Chapter Six
Cait
Friday came with sleet.
Cait had grown up in Chicago and had long since made her peace with November, but sleet was a specific category of unpleasantness that required a specific category of coat, and she had left the right coat at her parents' house in Bridgeport the previous weekend and had not yet retrieved it.
She arrived at the plant in a wool peacoat that was adequate for rain and inadequate for sleet, her hair darker than usual from the wet, her coffee cup held close.
Knox was already in the conference room.
She had not expected that. She had expected to arrive first, the way she always arrived first to these things, and to have the room set the way she wanted it before the other side came in.
Instead he was sitting at the far end of the table with his laptop open and three printed sheets in front of him, and he looked up when she came in without the particular pause of someone who had been caught at something.
"You're early," she said.
"So are you."
"I'm always early."
"I know," he said. "Dubowski mentioned it."
She set her bag down and took off the wet coat and hung it on the back of the chair. He watched her do this without looking away, which she noted but did not respond to. She sat down and opened her own folder and found the state grant documentation.
"Before we start," she said. She slid the pages across. "The Workforce Development Grant. State of Illinois, available to manufacturing facilities undergoing restructuring if they retain sixty percent of the workforce. Your firm has never accessed it."
He picked it up. He read it. She watched him the way she always watched people reading: where the eyes stopped, where they went back, what expression the face made when it encountered something unexpected.
His eyes stopped twice. They went back once.
"The income threshold for eligibility," he said.
"Meridian qualifies. Your acquisition price puts the facility under the threshold for the current fiscal year."
"How much?"
"Up to four hundred thousand. Dependent on the number of workers retrained and placed." She turned to her own copy. "Under the partial restructure model, with two hundred and eighty workers retained, the facility would be eligible for the maximum disbursement."
He set the pages down. He looked at them for a moment in the way he looked at things that required him to revise something.
"That changes the break-even timeline," he said.
"By approximately four months."
"Fourteen months instead of seventeen."
"Thirteen, if the Q2 contract comes through."
He made a note. She gave him a moment with it.
Outside, the sleet had eased into something that was not quite rain and not quite sleet, the particular indecision of Chicago weather in November. The windows were filmed with grey light. Someone in the corridor outside laughed at something, a man's laugh, short and genuine, and then it was gone.
"What else," Knox said. He was looking at her rather than at the pages.
"There's a comparable facility. Indiana. Steel processing, comparable workforce size, similar debt structure. Partial restructure completed fourteen months ago. They're operating at eighty-three percent capacity now, ahead of projections."
She slid the Indiana case file across. He took it.
"Who managed the restructure?"
"A firm called Kelton Advisory. Based in Indianapolis. Smaller than yours, but their methodology on retraining placement is regarded as the benchmark."
"I know Kelton." He was scanning the file. "Their placement rate is real. They have a partnership with the community college system."
"We have the same partnership available here.
City College of Chicago has a manufacturing technology programme.
It's undersubscribed." She found the relevant page.
"I spoke to the programme director on Wednesday.
They can absorb up to sixty additional students in the next cohort. Start date February."
He looked up from the file. "You spoke to City College."
"I spoke to City College, the state grant administrator, and a contractor who works with Kelton's placement team." She met his eyes. "I've been building this case for three weeks, Garrett."
She had used his first name without deciding to. She registered it after the fact. He did not react to it, or if he did the reaction was too small to see.
"Three weeks," he said. "Before the acquisition was announced."
"The acquisition was in the Cook County filings for six weeks before the announcement. Your firm's timeline was visible." She closed the folder. "I had three weeks to prepare. I used them."
He was quiet for a moment. Outside the sleet made a sound against the glass like something trying to get in.
"Why," he said.
She looked at him. "Why what."
"Why this much work. Your organisation handles multiple facilities. You could have sent a standard response package, objected to the closure under the WARN Act, negotiated a better severance. Standard procedure."
"Standard procedure gets standard outcomes."
"That's not an answer to the question."
She picked up her pen. She did not write anything.
"My father was a union electrician. He worked the same plant for twenty-three years.
When it closed he was fifty-one. They gave him standard severance and a handshake.
" She set the pen down. "He found work eventually.
It took three years and cost him ten years off his health.
Three hundred and forty families don't get that back. "
Knox did not say anything. He was looking at her with the grey-eyed directness that she was beginning to understand was not calculation but something closer to the opposite: a suspension of the filters most people kept running.
"I'll have a full analysis for my partner by Monday," he said.
"Your partner."
"Victor Hale. He has final authority on the restructure decision."
She nodded. "What does Hale need to see?"
"Everything you've given me. Plus a formal proposal document. Three to five pages. The case in writing."
"I can have it to you by Sunday evening."
"Sunday." He looked at her. "You're working this weekend."
"I work most weekends."
"So do I." He closed his laptop. There was a pause that lasted several seconds longer than the conversation required, and neither of them moved to fill it.
"There's a place on the river," he said then.
"Good food, not a tourist trap. If you've been working since Wednesday and I've been working since Monday, there's an argument for dinner before we both go back to our respective hotels and work through the night. "
She looked at him.
"That's a strange argument," she said.
"It's a practical one."
"We're on opposite sides of this negotiation."
"We're both trying to find the most accurate answer to the same question," he said. "That's not exactly opposite."
She considered this. She thought about what Diane had said: keep them separate until you know.
She thought about three hundred and forty and the grant and the Indiana file and the fact that he had been here at seven in the morning and had already built a counter-model before she walked in with the sleet on her coat.
"One dinner," she said. "I choose the place."
He almost smiled. She saw it: something at the edge of his mouth that arrived and then settled into something more controlled. "All right," he said.