Chapter Twenty
Cait
Two weeks into the restructure, the first problem arrived.
It came in the form of a call from the contractor she had been counting on for the fallback contract, the one she had promised Garrett by month twelve.
His name was Breckenridge, he ran a mid-size steel fabrication firm in Evanston, and he had been interested in a supply arrangement since October.
He called on a Tuesday evening when she was in the small office finishing the month-one data for the liaison report, and he told her, with the particular careful regret of someone delivering news they had been sitting on for a week, that he had gone in a different direction.
She asked which direction.
He said he had signed a preferred supplier arrangement with a facility in Gary, Indiana. Cheaper per unit, closer to his main production site. He was sorry. He had meant to call sooner.
She thanked him. She hung up. She sat for a moment with the information, turning it over, assessing the damage.
The second contract prospect was a packaging manufacturer in Cicero who had been interested but slow-moving, the kind of company that took three months to approve a letterhead change and would not be signing anything by month twelve without significant pressure.
She had known this about them and had counted on Breckenridge as the anchor.
She needed a third prospect. She had two weeks of contacts she had not yet worked through on the infrastructure side, two subcontractors who had bid on projects adjacent to the Lake Shore expansion and who might be in the market for a local steel supply arrangement. She would start there tomorrow.
She knocked on the door at the end of the corridor at seven-forty-five.
He opened it. He had his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up and a pen in his hand, and he looked at her face and said nothing, which was the correct response.
She came in and sat down. "Breckenridge pulled out," she said. "Gary facility. He signed with them last week."
Garrett set the pen down. "Your fallback contract."
"My fallback contract. I have two other prospects on the infrastructure side.
I'm calling them tomorrow." She looked at him.
"I'm not telling you this because it's a crisis.
I'm telling you because I said I'd keep you informed and I said I'd have a contract by month twelve and that commitment is still in place. "
"I know," he said.
"Hale doesn't need to know yet."
"No. At month six, if the pipeline is still open, he needs to know. Not before."
She had expected him to push for earlier disclosure.
The fact that he had not meant either that he trusted her timeline or that he had already assessed the two infrastructure prospects and reached the same conclusion she had.
She suspected it was the second. "You know about Kelleher and Santos," she said. The two subcontractors.
"Santos has a supply contract coming up for renewal in March. Kelleher is a stronger fit for Meridian's output specifications." He picked up his pen. "I'd call Kelleher first."
"I was going to call Kelleher first."
"I know."
She looked at him across the desk. The room at the end of the corridor was warmer than the small office and had a better desk and a view of the secondary parking lot that was not scenic but was at least unobstructed.
He had put nothing personal on the walls.
There was a notepad and a laptop and three printed documents in a neat stack and a coffee cup that was not chipped and not green.
"You've been researching the contract pipeline," she said.
"It's my job to know the commercial viability of the restructure."
"It's also my job."
"I know. We're not competing on it."
She considered that. She had been managing, since Monday, the specific tension of being professionally aligned with someone she was personally and inconveniently drawn to, and it required a kind of double attention that was more tiring than either thing on its own.
At the negotiating table she had been trained to hold opposing positions in her head simultaneously: what she wanted and what she could get and what the other side needed and what they would accept.
She was applying the same structure to this and finding it worked about as well as it worked across the table, which was to say it functioned but at a cost.
"The Garza thing," she said. "On the floor on Thursday."
"Yes."
"I don't want that to become part of how you see the case."
He looked at her steadily. "It already is."
"Garrett."
"Not in the way you mean." He leaned back in the chair. "I don't weight the analysis on sentiment. But knowing why something matters is part of understanding what it is. You understand the plant because you understand what happens to a family when it closes. That's not bias. That's context."
She was quiet for a moment. Outside the window, a truck pulled into the secondary lot, reversed carefully into a space, and cut its engine. The driver got out and lit a cigarette and stood in the cold looking at nothing in particular.
"Kelleher," she said.
"Kelleher," he agreed.
She stood to go. At the door she stopped, the way he sometimes stopped at the door of her office, and turned back. "The month-one report," she said. "I'll have the data to you by Friday."
"Thursday if you can."
"Thursday," she agreed.
She went back to the small office. The radiator was in one of its warm intervals. She sat at the wobbling desk and opened her laptop and pulled up the contact list for the infrastructure subcontractors and found Kelleher's number and wrote it on the legal pad at the top of a fresh page.
Below it, after a moment, she wrote: not competing.
She was not sure yet what to do with that. She left it there and went back to work.