Chapter Fifteen
Garrett
The committee response came at six forty-seven in the evening.
It was a single email from Cait, addressed to him and copied to Petrov.
Subject line: Meridian Steel: Response to Restructure Conditions.
Three paragraphs. The union's steering committee had voted to accept all three conditions as presented.
The pension contribution at ten percent year one was accepted.
The capacity trigger with forty-five-day cure period was accepted, with a note that the union would provide Ashford Meridian with a monthly progress report on the contract pipeline.
The on-site liaison condition was accepted.
He read it twice and then put the phone down and sat quietly for a moment.
Three hundred and forty jobs. The number had been in the file since he first picked it up on the plane over Lake Erie.
He had felt nothing particular about it then.
He felt something about it now, which was not sentimentality and not pride and was something closer to the satisfaction of a model that had resolved cleanly.
The right answer, confirmed. The thing that should happen, happening.
He called Victor.
"They accepted," he said.
"All three."
"All three."
Victor was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again his voice had the quality it had when something had gone better than he expected and he was calibrating how to feel about having expected less. "Good," he said. "Draw up the term sheet tonight. I want it to Dubowski's counsel by tomorrow morning."
"I'll have it done by midnight."
"And Garrett." A pause. "Start thinking about accommodation. If you're going to be in Chicago for six months you need something better than the hotel."
"I'll look tomorrow."
"Look tonight. The good ones go fast."
He hung up. He opened his laptop and pulled up the term sheet template and began drafting. He worked fast and cleanly, the way he worked when the thinking had already been done and the task was only execution. By eight-thirty he had a complete draft. He sent it to the firm's legal team for review.
At eight forty-four he texted Cait: Term sheet drafted. Legal review tonight. Dubowski's counsel gets it tomorrow morning.
Her reply: Good. Are you still at the plant?
He looked around the conference room, which had become something like his office in the past week and a half.
The city outside the window was dark, the South Side at night in November, the amber and white of the streetlights and the occasional red of a brake light and the blackness beyond where the lake was.
He had been in this building for more consecutive days than he had been anywhere besides his own apartment in the past three years.
He wrote back: Yes. You?
A pause. Then: Parking lot. I was about to leave.
He typed: Wait. And then looked at the word for a moment before he sent it.
He sent it.
He closed the laptop, put on his coat, and went downstairs.
She was leaning against her car in the parking lot with her coat buttoned and her bag over one shoulder and her breath making small clouds in the cold air. The lot was mostly empty. The night shift had parked further along. One security light made a yellow circle on the tarmac between them.
She looked at him when he came through the door. She did not move.
"It went through," he said.
"I know. I was there."
"Yes." He crossed the lot. He stopped when he reached her, close but not touching, the way he had learned to stand near her, in the specific awareness that the space between them was a decision that got made in one direction or the other. "I wanted to say it out loud."
"Three hundred and forty," she said.
"Yes."
She looked at him. Her eyes were dark in the parking lot light and very direct, the way they had been direct since the first morning. "Thank you," she said. "For following the data."
"The data was yours."
"You believed it."
"It was right."
She almost smiled. The edge of it, the version he had come to know. "You always say that," she said. "As if believing the right thing is simple."
"It isn't," he said. "It's just necessary."
She looked at him for a long moment. The cold moved between them. He could see the faint colour in her face from the temperature and the particular quality of her attention, focused and open at once, the thing he had been trying to name since the first meeting.
"You said we'd talk," she said. "After the case."
"The case isn't fully closed. The term sheet goes to counsel tomorrow."
"Garrett."
"I know," he said. "That's a technical argument and not a real one."
"Yes."
He reached out and tucked a strand of her hair back from her face, slow and deliberate, his fingers grazing the cold skin of her temple. She went very still. Not with tension. With something closer to the stillness he used himself, the stillness of someone paying close attention.
"Six months," he said.
"Six months," she agreed.
"That's a long time to be in the same building."
"It is."
"And a short time," he said, "depending."
She looked up at him. "Depending on what."
"On what we do with it."
The parking lot was quiet. The security light hummed very faintly.
Somewhere on the street a car went past and was gone.
She was looking at him the way she had looked at him on the plant floor on Monday, before she crossed the distance, and he understood that this time he was the one who was going to close it.
He did. He put his hand at the side of her face and kissed her in the parking lot with the cold around them and the hum of the security light above and the term sheet drafted and three hundred and forty jobs intact, and she kissed him back with both hands at his coat lapels and it lasted longer than Monday had, longer and slower and more deliberate, the kind of kiss that was not a question but a statement about what came next.
When they separated she was still holding his lapels. She looked at his chest for a moment, then up at him.
"I'm not going to make this easy for you," she said.
"I know."
"On the liaison work or otherwise."
"I know," he said again. He was aware that he was smiling, which was not a thing he did often in car parks in November. "I'm not looking for easy."
She released his lapels. She stepped back. She opened her car door. "Monday," she said. "First day of the restructure."
"Monday," he confirmed.
She got in and drove away. He stood in the cold for a moment longer than was strictly necessary and looked at the place where her car had been.
Then he went back inside to find somewhere to live for six months.