Chapter Eight
Cait
The walk back to her car was six blocks.
Garrett walked with her. She had not asked him to and he had not announced it.
He had simply stood when she stood, put on his coat, and come.
The sleet from earlier had cleared and the air was the kind of cold that came off the lake in November and settled into everything: the pavement, the brick, the space between her coat collar and her jaw.
They walked without talking for the first two blocks.
This did not feel strange. That was the thing she was turning over as they walked: that the silence between them, which should have been awkward given the context, given the conference room and the negotiation and three hundred and forty jobs, was not awkward.
It was simply a silence. Two people moving through the same cold air.
"The proposal document," she said. "Sunday evening."
"I'll be at the plant."
"You're staying the whole weekend."
"I said I would." He had his hands in his coat pockets. He was not looking at her, looking at the street ahead, but she had the impression of attention that had nothing to do with eye contact. "I don't make commitments I don't intend to keep."
"Is that a professional statement or a personal one."
He glanced at her. "Both, usually."
She looked ahead. A cat crossed the pavement thirty feet in front of them and vanished between two parked cars. Someone's window was lit orange and warm above them. She could hear music from somewhere, very faint.
"The dinner," she said. "It was useful."
"Yes."
"It's also a complication."
He was quiet for a moment. "I know."
"We're mid-negotiation."
"We are."
"And you're still here," she said. Not accusing. Noting.
"So are you."
She stopped at the corner. Her car was half a block further, a seven-year-old Civic that she had been meaning to replace for two years.
She turned to face him. In the streetlight he was precisely what he had been in every other light she had seen him in: still, and watching, and not pretending to be anything other than what he was.
"What happens Monday," she said. "When Hale gets the analysis."
"I don't know yet."
"You have a sense."
He looked at her. The cold had put colour into his face that the conference room had not, something less guarded, less arranged. "I have a sense that the numbers will say what they say, and that Victor will object, and that I'll have to decide how hard I want to push."
"And you don't know that yet."
"I know some of it," he said.
She waited. He did not fill the pause immediately, which was one of his habits she had identified by now: the pause before the thing he had actually decided to say.
"The analysis supports the partial restructure," he said.
"Substantially. The pension proposal needs work but it's not a dealbreaker.
The grant changes the numbers more than I expected.
If Victor were looking at this fresh, without the original closure recommendation already in place, he'd see what I see. "
"But it isn't fresh."
"No."
She held his eyes. The wind came down the street and moved her hair across her face and she reached up and pushed it back. He watched her do it.
"Then make it feel fresh," she said. "You know how to present a case. Present this one as if it's the first reading."
"That's what you'd do."
"That's what works."
He considered her for a moment. The streetlight was directly above them and it caught the angle of his face in a way that made visible something she had not seen clearly before: that the stillness was not absence. It was a form of restraint, and restraint implied something being held.
"Sunday evening," he said. "The proposal."
"By eight," she said.
He nodded. He took a step back, which was not quite a goodbye and not quite a stay. "Thank you for the restaurant," he said.
"It's the best birria in the city."
"I believe you."
She turned and walked the half block to her car. She did not look back. She was fairly disciplined about not looking back. She got in, started the engine, waited for the heat to come.
When she looked in the rear-view mirror he was still at the corner.
She pulled out and drove home.
She sat at her kitchen table for an hour with the legal pad open and did not write anything.
Then she opened her laptop and began the proposal document, which was the most important piece of writing she had produced in six years, and which she wrote in three hours without stopping, because the argument was clear to her now in a way it had not been before the dinner, and she was not entirely sure what to do with that.
She saved it at eleven-forty-three. She did not send it yet. Sunday, she had said.
She made herself a second cup of tea she did not need and stood at the kitchen window looking at the alley.
The alley in winter was a particular kind of honest: no trees to soften it, no foot traffic, just the yellow light from the building across the way and the fire escape casting its shadow and the lid of the dumpster with a thin line of snow along the top that the sleet had left and the overnight cold had preserved.
She had been careful, in six years of this work, not to let the personal stakes become a liability.
Her father, the three years, the ten years off his health: she kept those things in the room with her as a form of accountability, not as a wound that could be used against her.
She had watched other organisers lose cases because they had come in too hot, too obviously invested, giving the other side a reading on exactly how much they needed a particular outcome.
Need was leverage, and she did not give leverage to the other side.
Tonight she had told Garrett Knox about her father.
She turned it over. She did not think she had made an error.
The room had asked for it, or rather the man across the table had asked for it, with the question that was not quite a question, why this much work, and she had answered honestly because dishonesty in that specific moment would have cost her something she could not afford to lose.
Not his trust. His reading of her. He was trying to understand the case by understanding the person making it, and she had decided the honest reading was more useful than the managed one.
She was fairly sure she had decided that. She was less sure than usual.
She closed the laptop and went to bed and lay in the dark and thought about a man standing at a corner in the cold, watching something he had not yet named.