Chapter Twenty-One
Garrett
Kelleher called back on Thursday.
Garrett was in the room at the end of the corridor when Cait appeared in the doorway with her phone in her hand and an expression that was not quite a smile but was the thing that happened to her face when something had gone right.
He had learned to read that expression in the same way he had learned her footsteps on the stairs: without deciding to, through repetition.
"Kelleher wants a meeting," she said. "Next Tuesday. He's interested in a twelve-month supply arrangement, renewable annually."
"Quantity?"
She came in and sat down and turned the phone toward him so he could see the message.
The numbers were good. Not exceptional, but solid, the kind of volume that combined with the existing press line output would put the facility comfortably above the seventy percent capacity threshold by month fifteen, three months ahead of the trigger deadline.
"That covers the trigger," he said.
"With margin." She put the phone face down on the desk. "Breckenridge going to Gary was not the disaster I thought it was on Tuesday evening."
"It moved you to a better prospect."
"It did." She looked at him. "You knew Kelleher was the stronger fit."
"The output specifications matched better. Kelleher's production run is longer, which suits the press line's optimal batch size."
"You've been looking at the production specs."
"I told you. It's my job to know the commercial viability."
She was quiet for a moment. Outside the window, the secondary parking lot had a thin skin of ice on the tarmac from the overnight cold, and the morning sun was working on it without particular urgency.
A pigeon landed on the roof of the nearest car, looked around with the specific vacancy of pigeons, and left.
"The month-one report," she said. "I'll have it to you this afternoon."
"I know. You said Thursday."
"I said Thursday and it's Thursday and I'll have it this afternoon." She stood. At the door she paused, the way she paused at doors, turned back. "Are you doing anything tonight."
He looked at her. The question was neutral in tone and not neutral in content and they both knew it. "No," he said.
"There's a place in the West Loop. Not far from you, I'd think. A bar, good whiskey, very little ambient noise." She held his eyes. "Not a working dinner. Just a drink."
He had been in Chicago for three weeks. He had been in the same building as Cait Doyle for most of those three weeks, and they had not been alone together since the parking lot, which had been a deliberate exercise in professional restraint on both their parts and which had required, on his part, considerably more discipline than he had expected.
"What time," he said.
"Eight." She gave him the name of the bar. "I'll be there first."
"You're always there first."
"Old habit," she said. And left.
He looked at the door for a moment after she had gone. Then he looked at his laptop and the pension fund data and the quarterly report template Victor had sent and the three other things he had been meaning to deal with since Monday.
He thought about just a drink, which was the kind of phrase that meant exactly what it said and also never quite only what it said, and he thought about three weeks of the same corridor and the same building and the same professional restraint, which had been correct and necessary and which had cost him, if he was being precise about it, something in the neighbourhood of considerable.
He thought about her face when the Kelleher message had come through, the thing that happened before she managed it back into professional neutrality, the moment of actual feeling before the performance of composure.
He had been cataloguing those moments without intending to, the unguarded ones, the two seconds before she remembered where she was.
He had a growing collection of them and he was not certain what to do with the collection except that he was not willing to stop adding to it.
He dealt with all of them by six-thirty. He had not moved that fast through a workday in some time.