Chapter 5
ISAAC
On Monday morning, Basel Saad broke a cardinal rule. He marched into my office before I’d even finished my first cup of coffee with an expression on his face that suggested even a shot of whiskey wouldn’t have helped me process what he was here to say.
“Good morning, Basel,” I said cautiously, glancing at the magazine he was carrying under his arm as he shut the door with his free hand. “Did we have a meeting on the books for today?”
Instead of answering, he set the latest issue of Engineering News-Record on my desk and tapped the cover. “This is where you belong, Isaac.”
I frowned, completely confused. “On the cover of a magazine?”
“Yes,” he said crisply, lowering himself into the chair across from mine and smoothing out his impeccable silk tie as he held my gaze.
“If it’s covers you’re after, I’ll get you covers, but what I meant is that you belong at the forefront of innovation and design, blazing new trails and setting the pace in your profession. ”
I glanced at my half-empty mug of coffee, wondering if I’d have understood what he was talking about if I’d at least finished it before he’d gotten here. “That sounds good, but uh, it’s not really my role here. The fact that I got that cover was a bit of a fluke, to be honest.”
“Nonsense.” He flicked his hand in a dismissive motion, like he wouldn’t hear of such a thing. “You are right about one thing, however. That is not your role here.”
I swiped my tongue across my lips, deciding there was at least a fifty percent chance that I was either hallucinating or dreaming. “Yeah, well. Those are the breaks.”
He scoffed. “There’s no such thing if you work for me.”
I blinked a few times. “I know that with the merger?—”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” He cut me off without any hint of remorse and held my gaze intently across the desk. “Is this where you think you belong, Isaac? Are you happy here, sitting behind a desk in a big, ugly building only getting such a prestigious honor as the ENR cover by fluke?”
“I think so.”
He shook his head. “You should not think, son. You should know.”
I stared back at him, leaning more toward hallucinating than dreaming at this point. “All I know right now was that I wasn’t expecting a philosophical, existential debate before nine in the morning.”
He chuckled. “What if it wasn’t philosophical?”
My heart gave a strange stammer. “What are you saying, Basel? I’m really not sure I’m following.”
“You build beautiful things, Isaac.”
I frowned. “Thank you?”
He inclined his chin but spoke as if I hadn’t said anything at all. “I’ve seen a lot of your work over the last few days. Your ability to restore history is astounding, but so is your passion to create the future. You told me once that business wasn’t your thing.”
“Yeah, it’s not,” I said. “That’s why I switched over to engineering.”
Although, at this point, I wasn’t sure why he was referencing a conversation we’d had when I’d first met him so long ago, so maybe I should’ve switched over to… I don’t know? An advanced degree in speaking Basel?
Frankly, while I knew the guy, I didn’t know him half as well as Colin did, which meant I was complete unsure how to handle his pushy, slightly unhinged sudden passion about my career. “You switched over to engineering to be an engineer, no?”
“I am an engineer.”
“And yet, you’re stuck in this building.” He leaned forward and tapped my face on the magazine again. “I’ve read this article a few times and what I have learned is that you don’t belong here.”
I scoffed. “This company has been in my family for?—”
“No!” He cried out, throwing his arms out to his sides. “No, Isaac. That is not the right answer. It’s not about your family. It’s about what’s in here.”
He thumped a fist over his chest so hard that I was briefly concerned he might have a heart attack, but I’d seen Basel like this before. Usually from a distance, to be fair, but he was from a culture far more passionate than mine, and right now, it showed.
The man was getting truly emotional about this. Weird as fuck, but okay. Let’s roll with it.
“Again,” I said calmly. “Would you like to tell me why you came here this morning?”
A loud, booming laugh filled the office. “I came here to ask you to come work for me, of course. No, to work with me. We’ll be partners.”
I was so shocked that my mouth dropped open. “What?”
“I’m serious, Isaac. You belong out there in the world, changing the landscape of every city you touch and building what it’s going to look like in the future. You are wasting yourself here. You are wasting your talent.”
“Well, I don’t know that I’d go that far.”
“You’re not listening.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees and his dark eyes shining with enthusiasm. “Come back to Cairo with me. Thayer Steelworks doesn’t need you, but I do. They can find someone else to do their oversight. I cannot find someone else who can build the way you do.”
“Technically, that’s not true,” I said mildly, finding myself tamping down my own emotions more and more in the face of his only growing. “There are a lot of people who can build like me, and Thayer always needs good people.”
“Yes, but Thayer has Colin, Jane, and Ryan. It will have your other brothers soon too, and it’s got Alex Westwood and the whole might of Westwood and Sons watching its back.”
“Yeah?”
“So why are you here, Isaac? You were not born to wear a suit every day and walk these halls until your death.”
“That’s surprisingly morbid.”
“It’s accurate, is it not? When I look at you, I see a young man with the potential to shape what his generation of engineers leaves the world long after you’re gone. Do you know what I don’t see?”
“What’s that?”
“An executive,” he said. “In Egypt, I will help you register your own LLC. You and I will be partners?—”
“You’ve said that.”
“And I’ll say it again and again until you hear me. I can make you a very wealthy man. Together, we can achieve great things. I need someone like you, a builder I can trust with my history and the future of my city.”
I stared back at him as it finally dawned that he was completely serious about this. “Are you genuinely sitting inside of Thayer Steelworks, trying to recruit one of the Thayers?”
“Yes.”
“That’s… bold.”
He leaned back in his chair and smiled at me. “Think about it, Isaac. I’m offering you the opportunity to be your own man, to live your passions, to chase your dreams, and to make a great deal of money doing it.”
I swallowed hard, but when I didn’t respond, he came in for the kill. “If I don’t deliver on my promises, Thayer Steelworks and your family will always be here waiting for you, but I will deliver, Isaac. I always do. Together, you and I will?—”
“Fine,” I said, just to get him off my back. “I’ll do it. I’ll come to Egypt.”
Basel’s eyebrows rose slowly, but then he flashed me a triumphant grin and stood. “Excellent. I knew you’d come around.”
“Yeah.”
Swiping the magazine off my desk, he tucked it back under his arm and crossed my office, but paused after he’d opened the door. “You’d better get packing, my boy. I leave tonight.”
Without another word, he strode out of my office and let the door swing shut behind him, leaving me to wonder if I’d really just told Basel Saad I’d come work for him in Egypt, or if maybe I really had been dreaming.
Operating mostly on autopilot, I reached for my coffee, convinced that once I took a sip, it would still be piping hot and Basel’s visit would’ve been nothing but a daydream, but when the ice-cold liquid hit my lips, I jerked from how stunned I was.
“Fuck, it was real.”
I slammed back in my chair and scrubbed my hands over my face, but when I pulled them away, I found myself looking around my office, at my hardhat hanging on the coatrack gathering dust and the stacks of drawings on the bottom of bookshelves, plans I’d doodled that I’d long since given up on.
For the last few months, I’d been wondering whether I should branch out on my own someday, and while this wasn’t really branching out, it would be taking the first step toward doing my own thing. Without abandoning the family business for good.
GlobalStar and Thayer were working together, which meant I’d stay sort of under the Thayer umbrella if I took Basel up on his offer.
Finally unable to keep sitting still, I stood up and wandered toward the window, looking out at Chicago for approximately seven seconds before I started laughing out loud.
This was crazy. Chicago was home and yet I was already mentally packing my bags. In my mind, there was only one thing left to do and that was survive telling my family. I spun around and headed to Jane’s office, finding Colin and Ryan already in there with her.
They were wrapping up a meeting, a whole table of executives listening to Colin and Ryan give rapid-fire updates about something having to do with our finances. I waited at the door until the execs filed out, then drew in a deep breath and walked inside, shutting her door firmly behind me.
Jane sank back in her seat, smiling with relief. Until she frowned after taking just one look at my face. “Isaac? Is everything okay?”
“I think so,” I said slowly, looking from her, to each of my brothers, and then back again. “Basel came to see me this morning.”
Colin blinked rapidly, checking his watch for some reason. “That’s weird. I’m not supposed to meet with him for another couple hours.”
“Yeah. No. He, uh, he wasn’t there looking for you,” I said, planting my hands on the back of one of the chairs at Jane’s conference table and tightening my grip. “He really did come to see me.”
“What did he want?” Jane asked, a slightly concerned furrow on her brow, but at this point, she seemed fairly used to being surprised by him. “Was it about the structural integrity of the facility we’re converting? Because I’ve told him a dozen times that?—”
“He wants me to come work for him in Egypt,” I blurted out.
Jane blinked hard, Colin froze with his hand halfway to a bottle of water, and Ryan’s eyebrows shot up, but not one of them said a single word. I let out a nervous chuckle, rubbing the back of my neck as I wondered if maybe this hadn’t been the right decision after all.
Colin shook his head. “Obviously, you said no.”
“I may have said yes.”
My sister stared at me for several more seconds, then very, very slowly leaned over and crossed her arms on the table. “Are you seriously telling me that you’re quitting Thayer Steelworks and moving to Egypt?”