Chapter Eleven
Garrett
The call lasted ninety minutes.
Victor asked fourteen questions. Garrett had anticipated eleven of them.
The three he had not anticipated were the good ones, the ones that probed the edges of the model rather than the centre, and Cait answered all three without hesitation, which meant she had anticipated them even if Garrett had not.
He sat slightly apart from the speaker, his own notes in front of him, and listened to the two of them work through the pension underfunding model.
Victor was not a hostile questioner. He was a thorough one, which was more demanding in its own way, and he pushed on the seven-year recovery timeline with the specific precision of someone who had found the weakest joint in the structure and was testing whether it would hold.
It held.
Cait had a variant timeline. Six years with a higher union contribution in years one and two, front-loaded because the grant disbursement would partially offset it.
She had built the variant specifically for this objection.
Garrett had not known she had it. He watched Victor's tone shift, not toward warmth, Victor did not do warmth on calls, but toward something more measured, the tone of a man who was revising his prior position without saying so aloud.
When the call ended Victor said he needed forty-eight hours.
After the line went dead, Garrett and Cait stayed on for a moment. The silence on the call was different from the silences in the room, thinner, with the background hiss of an open line.
"The variant timeline," he said.
"I built it Friday night. After I sent the proposal."
"You thought he'd push on the pension."
"I was certain he'd push on the pension. It's the most exposed variable in the model."
"You didn't lead with it."
"You don't lead with the variant. You let them find the problem and then you have the answer ready. It lands differently." A pause. "You know that."
He did know that. He had used the same technique in boardrooms for twelve years. He had not expected to find it used against him, or alongside him, he was not entirely sure which this was.
"Forty-eight hours," she said.
"He'll come back with conditions. He always has conditions."
"I expected conditions."
"Some of them will require renegotiation."
"Then we renegotiate." A beat. "Are you going to be in Chicago for the forty-eight hours."
"Yes."
"Good," she said. And then the line closed.
He sat in the office for a moment. Outside on the plant floor the day shift was running.
He could hear the press line through the floor, the deep rhythmic percussion of the Schuler doing the work it had been built to do, steady and mechanical and not interested in whether the humans above it had sorted out their differences.
He had two other acquisitions active. A warehouse logistics firm in New Jersey and a medical device manufacturer in Minneapolis. Both had open items. He had calls scheduled for both that afternoon.
He cancelled them.
He told himself it was because the Meridian analysis required his full attention in the forty-eight hours before Hale came back.
That was true. It was also not the complete truth, and Garrett had a long-established habit of being honest with himself about incomplete truths, because incomplete truths had a way of becoming expensive later.
The complete truth was that he did not want to leave the building while she was in it.
He sat with that for a moment. He had not wanted things of this category in a long time.
He had dated, with some regularity, women who were interesting and available and who understood that his work was not a thing that could be arranged around a relationship.
The relationships had ended, each time, for reasons that were clear in retrospect and not quite clear enough in the moment.
He had attributed this to the nature of his work.
He was now considering whether the attribution had been precise.
He opened the pension variant model and went back to work.
At five forty-five he heard footsteps on the stairs that he recognised before he saw her.