Chapter Eighteen
Cait
Monday arrived with the kind of clarity that followed a cold weekend, the air sharp and the sky a hard pale blue and every surface in the city carrying a thin layer of frost that the morning sun was beginning to address with no particular urgency.
Cait arrived at the plant at seven-fifteen.
Petrov was already there, along with Hicks and two other steering committee members, Rosa Delgado and a man named Farrell who had been on the secondary line for eighteen years and who had barely spoken during the negotiations but had read every document she put in front of him with the thoroughness of someone who understood that the fine print was where things were won or lost. They were gathered in the corridor outside the main conference room, coffee in hand, and there was a quality to the gathering that she recognised from other mornings: people arriving early because the day mattered.
"Today's the day," Petrov said.
"Today's the first day," she said. "There are a lot of them still to go."
"But this one we remember."
She looked at him. He was right. She knew he was right.
She had learned early in this work that the day the deal was signed was not the day that mattered most, that what mattered most was the implementation and the monitoring and the fallback contract she had promised by month twelve.
But she also knew what Petrov meant, which was that the people in this building had spent six weeks not knowing whether they had jobs, and that the day the answer became yes was a day worth marking.
She went to the small office. She hung her coat. She opened her laptop.
Garrett's email was already there, timestamped seven-oh-three.
It was two sentences: Term sheet effective today.
On-site from this morning. She read it twice, which was not necessary, and then she wrote back: I know.
Small office, second floor, left of the stairs.
She sent it before she second-guessed the tone.
His reply came in six minutes: I'll find it.
She was on a call with the City College programme director when she heard him come up the stairs at eight-forty.
She knew his footsteps now, which was an intimacy she had not intended to acquire and which was not particularly useful professional information.
She kept her eyes on her laptop screen and continued the call.
He knocked on the open door. She looked up and held up one finger. He nodded and leaned against the doorframe with his coat still on and his bag over one shoulder, and she finished the call and hung up.
"City College," she said. "The February cohort. Enrolment opens next week."
"How many of the sixty have confirmed?"
"Forty-three. The other seventeen are in conversations. I have a meeting with their line supervisors on Wednesday."
He came in and sat down across from her. He had found the chair that did not wobble, which was the one on the right, which meant he had already assessed the room before he sat in it. She noted this.
"The first monthly report," he said. "Victor wants it in thirty days. I'll need your data on retraining progress, pension contribution status, and contract pipeline."
"I'll have it in twenty-five. I'd rather you have time to review before it goes to Hale."
He looked at her. "You're going to give me advance sight of the union's report."
"I'm going to give the liaison advance sight of the data so the report is accurate." She met his eyes. "That's what a liaison is for."
Something shifted in his expression, very small. Not amusement exactly, but something adjacent to it. "All right," he said.
"There's a desk in the room at the end of the corridor," she said. "Dubowski said you could use it. The radiator works in that one."
"Does yours not work."
"Mine works in intervals."
"I'll be in the room at the end of the corridor," he said. He stood. He picked up his bag. At the door he stopped. "Cait."
She looked up.
"Good morning," he said. As if it were a thing he had decided to say rather than a thing that happened automatically, which for him she was beginning to understand it always was.
"Good morning," she said.
He went down the corridor. She heard his door open and close. She sat in the interval of the radiator's silence and looked at her laptop screen and did not immediately remember what she had been doing before he arrived.
Then she remembered and went back to it.