Chapter 8
Callum
By seven the next morning, I had decided the only thing worse than wanting Avery in my building was not being allowed to think about wanting Avery in my building.
Work, in theory, should have solved that.
Steel did not care what a man wanted, nor did it care what kept him awake late at night.
Contracts did not blush, zoning boards did not soften their voices, and legal threats, however tedious, demanded immediate attention without distraction.
I arrived at Rowe Tower before most of the city had fully committed to the day, after two hours of sleep and a shower too cold to be enjoyable.
At nine, Avery would walk into this building as an employee.
At nine, she would belong to operations, to Benjamin, to Dana, to payroll and policy and the thousand other impersonal mechanisms that made a company safer than a private dinner.
Until then, I had contracts to review, a civil project to protect, and a rival firm circling close enough that I could smell their cologne.
Benjamin entered my office fifteen minutes after I got there. He didn’t knock, which meant either the building was on fire or he had decided knocking was for the weak. He carried his tablet, a leather folder, and a paper cup of coffee he did not offer me.
“Good morning,” he said, in the tone of a man announcing war crimes.
“It rarely is when you open with that voice.”
“I have several voices. This is my moderately apocalyptic one.”
“Comforting.”
“It is meant to establish urgency without encouraging panic.” He stopped in front of my desk and held up the tablet. “Should I assemble the war cabinet?”
I leaned back in my chair and sighed. “Is it that time already?”
“Lang’s people started early. Evil is often punctual.”
That cut through the last fog of sleeplessness.
I held out my hand, and he gave me the tablet.
On the screen was a local politics column, not one of the major papers yet, but one of those insider newsletters that everyone in city development pretended not to read and then quoted by lunch.
The headline was vague enough to be cowardly and pointed enough to draw blood: Questions Swirl Around Rowe Structural’s Hartwell Civic Center Bid After Prior Site Concerns Resurface.
I read the first paragraph. Then the second. By the third, my jaw had set hard enough that Benjamin, who noticed everything, took a careful half-step back out of the blast radius.
“They don’t name Lang specifically,” I observed.
“No. They prefer to waft around that.”
“They don’t name the prior site either.”
“No. The modern smear campaign is less knife, more perfume atomizer.”
I scrolled. The article was a masterpiece of implication without commitment.
It did not accuse Rowe Structural of anything specific because specificity created legal exposure.
It only gestured toward a prior building site on the east side, one already complicated by council politics and an unrelated labor dispute, and invited readers to do the research themselves.
The message was clear enough though. Rowe had been selected to lead the Hartwell Civic Center contract, and someone wanted the city to think we were too compromised to keep it.
Lang wanted the job, but they had lost the bid, and they did not lose gracefully.
I set the tablet down. “Get everybody together.”
Benjamin’s eyes brightened in a way that would have concerned a less experienced man. “The actual war cabinet or the decorative one we invite when we need minutes taken?”
“Actual. Legal, PR, Dana, Marcus from government relations, Elise from risk, and Tom if he’s not already inventing ulcers somewhere in legal.”
“He is. I passed him in the hall. Very pale. Excellent pacing form.”
“Conference room A. Twenty minutes.”
“Fifteen?”
“Twenty.”
“Fifteen will imply moral seriousness.”
“Fine. Fifteen.”
Benjamin tapped something into his tablet with the satisfaction of a general moving cavalry. “Should I bring scones?”
I stared at him.
“For morale,” he said.
“No.”
“For intimidation?”
“No.”
“For me?”
“You may have a scone, Benjamin.”
“Thank you. Leadership begins with nourishment.”
He turned to leave, then stopped at the door. “Your nine o’clock variable arrives in one hour and forty-two minutes.”
“Her name is Avery.”
“So you keep insisting.” His expression stayed bland. “Do you want me to handle her first-day intake personally, or shall I ask Dana to start with the corporate systems and only lightly bruise her spirit?”
“Handle her,” I intoned. “Carefully.”
Benjamin gave me a look. “I was going to use the onboarding packet, not a trebuchet.”
“Fairly,” I added.
His face shifted just enough to let me know he had heard everything I had not said. “Of course.”
The war cabinet assembled in the conference room in fifteen minutes starting with Elise, Marcus, powerhouse Dana Keene, and Tom. Benjamin stood near the screen like a court official at a trial he fully intended to enjoy.
I stayed at the head of the table and let them read the column in silence.
Dana finished first. “This is obviously Lang.”
“Likely,” I agreed.
“Not likely. It’s Lang. Their fingerprints are all over the cowardice.”
Tom rubbed a hand over his mouth. “It’s too vague to sue.”
Benjamin made a disappointed sound. “Lawyers are always saying that at the worst possible times.”
Tom ignored him, because most sane people eventually learned to. “There’s no direct allegation. There isn’t any specific claim we can prove false either, because nothing is actually claimed. It’s all insinuation. Sleazy, but protected unless they get reckless.”
“They will,” Dana interjected.
“Maybe,” Tom said. “But not yet.”
Marcus leaned forward. “The mayor’s office is nervous.
They were already getting heat from the preservation bloc, the labor coalition, and half the council members who wanted the gallery portion separated from the municipal offices.
If Lang can make this look like a safety or ethics issue, even vaguely, the mayor could pause the contract. ”
“To reopen the bid,” Elise said.
“To hand it to Lang,” Dana corrected.
There it was, sitting plainly in the room now.
No one needed the entire history spoken aloud.
The prior site the article was talking about had been messy and political.
There had been a safety audit, then a second one.
There had been protests for reasons only partly connected to the building.
There had been a councilman looking for a microphone, a subcontractor with a discipline problem, and one structural question that had been answered in writing, stamped, reviewed, and closed.
Nothing there justified this. Nothing there endangered Hartwell.
“What do we need to do?” I asked.
Tom spoke first. “Legal team is already preserving everything. We send notice to the newsletter and every outlet that repeats this language that it has no merit, no factual basis, all rights reserved. We don’t threaten suit unless they cross into something actionable.”
“I hate that phrase,” Dana complained.
“All rights reserved?”
“No, actionable. It’s lawyer speak for ‘we have to sit here while someone flicks lit matches at our curtains.’”
Benjamin nodded. “Vivid and correct.”
Elise tapped her pen once against the table. “Defensive posturing alone won’t be enough. We need our own fact sheet ready. Prior site, audits, approvals, independent review. Short, plain language. No twenty-page engineering sermon.”
I looked at Marcus.
He nodded. “I’ll speak with the mayor’s chief of staff before lunch. We tell them we’re aware of the rumor campaign, we take it seriously, and we’ll supply documentation. The mayor needs political cover to stay steady.”
“Do we name Lang?” Dana asked.
“No,” Marcus said.
“I hate that.”
“So do I,” he replied. “But if we come out swinging at Lang without proof, we look defensive. Worse, we elevate them.”
Benjamin lifted one finger. “What if I anonymously release a tasteful yet devastating poem?”
“No,” I said.
“A limerick?”
“No.”
“An acrostic that spells Lang Lies?”
“Benjamin.”
“Just testing the boundaries of institutional courage.”
Despite the room’s tension, Dana lips curved just slightly, but then immediately flattened. Then she looked back at me. “We can’t just sit up on the high road while they throw dirt at us.”
“No,” I responded. “We don’t sit. We stand there with floodlights.
” I looked around the table. “We aggressively deny the implication without repeating it. We provide documentation before they ask for it. We put legal on every outlet. We give the mayor’s office facts, not emotion.
We keep our project team calm. No one freelances.
No one speculates. No one gives an off-the-record comment because they want to feel important for fifteen minutes. ”
Benjamin’s gaze cut toward Marcus.
Marcus raised both hands. “Why is everyone looking at government relations?”
“Because your people treat journalists like houseplants,” Benjamin said. “You feed them too often and then act surprised when they grow toward the light.”
“Enough,” I interjected, though not as harshly as I could have. “Lang doesn’t need to prove we did anything wrong. They just need to introduce doubt.”
“And if the mayor folds?” Elise asked.
“Then we fight.”
Tom looked at me. “Publicly or legally?”
“Yes.”
Benjamin murmured, “There he is.”
I ignored that too.
For the next twenty minutes, we built the response in pieces.
Legal would draft notices and map exposure.
Risk would compile the clean chronology of the prior site, with every inspection, approval, third-party review, and council communication in one place.
Marcus would get in front of the mayor’s office and the two council members most likely to perform outrage for cameras.
Dana would brief internal project leadership and make it clear that anyone caught gossiping into a reporter’s lap would have a short meeting with her that would coincide with a swift kick in the ass out the door.