10. Nolan
NOLAN
The construction schedule hits my inbox at six-fourteen. By six-thirty, I’ve gone through it twice and chosen whose morning I’m about to ruin.
The architect leading that stretch of the project is, by her own choice, three months pregnant and walking the site in a hard hat that no longer fits her.
Devon picks up on the second ring, because Devon picks up on the second ring whether it is six in the morning or eleven at night. That is what I pay him for, and it is also the reason I have not fired him in nine years of him telling me to my face that I am about to do something stupid.
"It's six-thirty in the morning, Nash."
"Are you up?"
"I am now, you absolute menace. What."
"I need a read on something."
"You need a therapist on something. I'm a lawyer. Tell me anyway."
I tell him. I keep it short. I leave Miami out; Devon Yates has known me since sophomore-year dorms, and he doesn’t need it spoken aloud to fill it in.
He listens. He pours something—bourbon, by the sound of it, at six-thirty in the morning—which is exactly what he does when he’s gearing up to deliver a sentence I won’t like.
“Nash. Listen to me.”
“I’m listening.”
“No, you’re not. You’re calling me from a desk on the forty-eighth floor with your hand already on the keys, and you’re doing it so that when this goes sideways at noon you can tell your sister you consulted counsel. I’m not playing that role for you today. I’m giving you the real read.”
"Then give it to me."
"The actual read is this. You met a woman at a gala three months ago.
You spent one night with her. She is pregnant, and she is keeping it, and she has told you, in plain English, in a room with the blinds drawn, that she does not want you to manage her life.
You are now considering driving across town to a job site to which you have not been invited, to tell her in front of her own crew that she is not allowed to do her own job because you are concerned about her welfare.
Is that a fair summary of what you're about to do. "
"You're being dramatic."
"I am being a lawyer. There is a difference.
Nash, I'm telling you this as your friend, not as your counsel: every single thing you are about to do is going to make her trust you less.
Every one of them. You will walk away from that site feeling like you protected her.
She will walk away from that site feeling like you proved her right.
And the next time you want her to listen to you about something that actually matters, she will not. "
"She is climbing scaffolding, Devon. On a slab I personally ordered red-tagged for inadequate fall protection three weeks ago. She is — she is doing field inspections at a site where the general contractor is one citation away from losing his license. I am not making this up."
“I believe you. I’m not arguing with you about the danger.
I’m telling you that marching down there in a suit and barking at her is not a solution.
It’s a tantrum. Send her project manager a letter.
Have Claire request a safety review. Move the south parcel inspection schedule.
Do any of those. Just don’t go down there yourself. ”
"Noted."
"Noted and ignored. I can hear it in your voice, Nash."
"Have a nice morning, Devon."
"Try not to get a restraining order before nine, Nolan."
I hang up. The car is downstairs in eleven minutes.
The site on West Lake is exactly the kind of place I do not want a pregnant woman standing in.
The freight elevator on the south end is out of service, which means the only way to the upper floors is the temporary stair tower bolted to the back of the building, and the temporary stair tower bolted to the back of the building was permitted in April and has, by the calendar in my head, been overdue for re-inspection since the second week of August.
I find her on the third floor.
She is standing on a temporary platform along the east wall, in a hard hat that is, in fact, too big for her, a high-vis vest zipped over a wool coat she has not bothered to button, and a pair of work boots I am almost certain she has owned since graduate school.
She has a red pen in one hand and a roll of drawings in the other, and she is leaning, not far but far enough, over the edge of the platform to point at something a foreman in his fifties is pretending to look at on the floor below.
The platform is rated for two hundred and fifty pounds. There are three people on it. The railing on the back side is missing a vertical baluster I can see from where I am standing.
"Miss Sutton."
She doesn't turn. The foreman does. Two of his crew do. The pen pauses against the drawing.
“Mr. Ashford,” she says, still not turning. “I wasn’t expecting you out here today, given that this site isn’t on my schedule and isn’t one of yours. Are you lost.”
"I need a minute of your time. On the ground. Now, please."
"I'm in the middle of an inspection."
"You are in the middle of an inspection on a platform that is not rated for the load it is carrying, on a stair tower that is six weeks overdue for re-inspection, in a building my firm's structural team red-tagged in June. Come down off the platform, Arielle. Please."
She turns. The hard hat slips and she steadies it with the back of her wrist. It’s the same face I watched disappear into a town car on Wacker, arranged with the kind of composure that looks rehearsed, the sort you learn young and never unlearn.
"Don," she says, to the foreman, without taking her eyes off me, "give me five minutes. Walk Terry through slide nine. I'll be right back."
The foreman, who is no fool, takes one look at the man in the cashmere overcoat standing in his stairwell and finds somewhere else to be very quickly.
The crew follows him. Arielle steps down off the platform with one hand braced on the temporary railing — the one without the missing baluster, I notice — and walks past me toward the stairwell with her drawings under her arm.
I follow her down two flights. She doesn't stop until we are on the slab outside, on the east side of the building, where the wind off the lake is doing its best to take the hard hat off her head.
"You do not get to do this, Nolan. You do not get to show up at a job site you do not own and pull rank in front of my foreman in a coat that costs more than his truck.
You do not get to call me Miss Sutton in front of my crew and then please me down a flight of stairs like I'm a child being walked out of a grocery store.
I am working. This is my job. You are interfering with my job. "
"I am not interfering with your job. I am asking you not to do your job on a platform that is missing a baluster."
"The baluster was reported on Friday. The crew has a fix order in for tomorrow. I am not climbing the platform without three points of contact and I am not, despite the entire fantasy you appear to be running in your head this morning, an idiot."
"I never said you were an idiot."
"You said please to me three times in two minutes, Nolan.
That is the please a man uses when he thinks the woman in front of him needs help understanding her own situation.
I have been doing field inspections since I was twenty-three.
I know what a missing baluster looks like.
I know what a red tag looks like. I know what an overdue stair tower inspection looks like, because I am the one who filed the request to expedite it last Wednesday, which you would know if you had asked me before getting in your car this morning instead of after. "
She takes a step back to put distance between us, and her boot catches the edge of a pile of loose gravel along the perimeter, and her ankle rolls — not far, not catastrophically, but enough that her hand flies out for a railing that is not there.
I am closer than I should be. I have her elbow before her shoulder has decided which way it is going.
"Easy."
"I'm fine."
"I have your elbow, Arielle. You're fine in about four seconds. Hold still."
She holds still. Her hand is curled around the lapel of my coat in a fist she did not consciously make.
Her hard hat has slipped forward enough that I can see the part in her hair, the small soft place at her temple where the curl I noticed in Miami still tries to escape whatever she has done to discipline it.
She smells, even now, even here, like coconut and something underneath that is just her.
"You can let go of me, Nolan."
"In a minute."
"Now would be fine."
"In a minute, Arielle. The gravel goes another three feet to your left and there is rebar standing up out of the ground past that.
I would like to stand here, on this exact patch of concrete, with my hand on your elbow, until you have your weight on the foot that did not just roll.
You can be angry at me about it on the way back upstairs. "
She breathes out through her nose. She does not let go of the lapel. I do not point that out, because I am not, today, that stupid.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell her, lower.
“I need that understood. You’ve been behaving since Friday as though speed equals escape, as though if you move quickly enough I’ll lose interest. I won’t.
I’m not forgetting by Monday. I’m not stepping back because you outwaited me in a conference room.
You’re carrying my child. And you are, independently, the most maddening professional I’ve ever encountered.
I’m not leaving, Arielle. Challenge me for six months if you like. I’ll still be here in March.”
She lets go of the lapel. She does not step back yet. The gravel is still there. So is my hand on her elbow.
"Let me go, Nolan."
I let her go.
She straightens her hard hat. She picks up the drawing she dropped.
She walks past me toward the stair tower with her shoulders set the way she had them at the gala, and she does not look back, and I stand on the slab in the wind off the lake and I watch her go, and somewhere two floors above us the foreman starts yelling at his crew about the baluster.