Chapter Sixteen
Cait
She called her father from the car.
He picked up on the second ring, which meant he had been awake, which at nine in the evening meant he was watching something on television with the volume too loud and a cup of decaf he maintained was regular.
"Caitlin."
"It went through, Dad."
A silence. She could hear the television cut off in the background. "All of it."
"Two hundred and eighty jobs retained. Sixty retraining placements through City College starting in February. The pension recovery fund starts Q1." She stopped at a red light. The intersection was bright and empty. "Three hundred and forty families."
Her father did not say anything for a moment.
She had heard him not say things in a particular way her whole life and she knew this one: it was the silence of someone who had been waiting for something for a long time and now that it was here did not quite know what to do with the space it had occupied.
"Good girl," he said, finally. Which was what he had said when she was seven and passed her swimming test and fourteen and got her first summer job and twenty-three when she got into law school, and which meant something larger and less containable than the words themselves.
"I had help," she said. "The other side followed the data."
"That's rare."
"Yes."
"Who was it."
She hesitated one beat too long. Her father had been a union man for thirty years and had been reading people across negotiating tables for most of them, and he heard the beat the way he heard most things: accurately.
"The private equity partner," she said. "Garrett Knox."
"Knox."
"He's the one who brought the analysis to his firm. He overrode the original closure recommendation."
"And."
She turned onto her street. The familiar houses, the familiar amber of the streetlights, the frost beginning again on the parked cars. "And nothing yet, Dad."
"Yet," he said.
"He's the on-site liaison for the next six months. He'll be at the plant."
Another silence, different from the first. Thoughtful rather than moved. Her father did not rush his conclusions. It was one of the things she had inherited from him along with the spreadsheet and the habit of arriving early. "Is he straight?" he said. The same question Petrov had asked.
"Yes," she said. The same answer. "He went back to the source data on his own methodology before our second meeting."
Her father made a sound that was not quite a word but communicated something in the neighbourhood of: that's not nothing.
"Be careful," he said. Not a warning. An acknowledgement that she was going to do what she was going to do and that he trusted her judgment on it and that he wanted her to know he was paying attention.
"I know."
"Call me next week."
"I will."
She parked and sat in the car for a moment after she hung up. The engine ticked as it cooled. The street was quiet. Above the building across from her a strip of sky was visible between the rooftops, dark and clear, the first stars appearing in the gap between two weather systems.
She thought about the parking lot. His hand at the side of her face. The cold and the hum of the security light and the way the kiss had been different from Monday, slower and more deliberate, the kind that left a shape in the air after.
She thought about six months in the same building and what that meant and what she was going to do about it, which was not nothing and not everything and was the kind of question that only answered itself through the living of it.
She had built her life around a particular discipline: you did not allow what you wanted to distort what was true.
You held the two apart, the want and the fact, and you worked from the fact and you let the want be what it was without giving it authority over the work.
She had been good at that discipline. She had been so good at it that there had been stretches of years, not unhappy years but lean ones, where the want had been so far back from the surface that she had almost not noticed it was there.
Garrett Knox had a way of sitting at a table that made the want very difficult to keep at the back of anything.
She was going to have to think carefully about that.
She was going to have to think carefully about what it meant to be in the same building for six months with someone who went back to the source data on his own methodology and cancelled two calls and stood in a parking lot in November looking like he had somewhere better to be and had decided he was already there.
She got out of the car. The cold hit her immediately.
She stood for a moment on the pavement outside her building with the stars showing in the gap between the rooftops and the city around her doing what cities did at nine in the evening in November, and she let herself feel, just for a moment, the specific satisfaction of a thing done right.
Three hundred and forty.
She went inside.