Chapter Five
Garrett
He called Victor Hale at seven-thirty that evening from his hotel room.
Victor was a senior partner at Ashford Meridian and had been with the firm for eleven years, which was three years longer than Garrett, and he had a way of answering the phone that communicated, without saying it, that he had been expecting the call and that he already knew what it would contain. He was usually right.
"The meeting," Victor said.
"There are complications."
A pause. Victor did not like that word, not because it surprised him but because it created work, and Victor managed his workload with the same precision he applied to everything else. "Define complications."
"The union sent someone with an alternative analysis.
Infrastructure contracts, retraining cost data, a capital asset case for the press line.
" Garrett was standing at the window. The Chicago skyline was south of him, the lake invisible in the dark but present in the way large things were present even when you could not see them. "The data is sound."
"Sound enough to pause the closure?"
"Sound enough to warrant a full review."
Another pause, longer. "Garrett."
"I'm not recommending a reversal. I'm recommending due diligence. There's a difference."
"The board timeline is ninety days."
"I know the timeline." He turned from the window. "Give me ten days. I'll have a full counter-analysis by then."
Victor was quiet for a moment in a way that meant he was thinking rather than objecting. They had worked together long enough that Garrett could read the silences. "Who is the union person?"
"Cait Doyle. Chicago Workers Alliance. She's a senior organiser."
"Is she any good?"
Garrett looked at the notepad on the desk. Nineteen point three percent. "Yes," he said.
"That's unfortunate."
"It's useful. If her analysis holds up under review, the partial restructure model is more profitable over a three-year horizon than the closure."
"If," Victor said.
"Ten days," Garrett said.
Victor said he would think about it, which meant yes. They hung up. Garrett ordered food from the hotel kitchen and ate it at the desk while he went through Cait Doyle's folder a second time, this time with his own spreadsheet open beside it, building the counter-model from scratch.
He worked until one in the morning. When he stopped it was not because he was tired but because the numbers had reached a point where they needed external data he did not have yet, the state grant information she had mentioned, the Indiana comparable case, the full pension underfunding breakdown.
He needed what she had not yet shown him.
He closed the laptop.
He had built the partial restructure model in parallel with his standard closure model, the way he always built counter-scenarios, not to validate a preferred outcome but to understand the actual shape of the choice.
The gap between them was not what he had expected.
The closure model was cleaner, faster, less dependent on third-party performance.
The partial restructure was slower and required things he did not control: the state grant approval, the City College cohort, the Q2 infrastructure contract. It contained more variables.
It also, at the eighteen-month mark, produced a better return. Not marginally. By eleven percent.
He had run the model three times to be certain. The eleven percent held.
He thought about the way she had picked up the cold coffee and drunk it anyway.
He was not sure why that particular detail stayed with him.
It was not a significant detail. It did not change the analysis.
But he found that when he tried to set it aside and think about something else, it was still there, small and specific and not going anywhere.
A woman who did not waste things. Who had been sitting in that room long enough for the coffee to go cold and had drunk it regardless, because the coffee was there and she was still working and there was no reason to let a thing go to waste simply because it was no longer at its best.
He went to sleep at one-fifteen.
He was at the plant by seven.