Chapter Twenty-Seven
Garrett
Victor was quiet in the car to O'Hare for the first fifteen minutes.
Garrett drove. The afternoon traffic on the expressway was the usual Chicago version of itself: dense and moving, rarely stopping completely, the kind of traffic that required attention without demanding it.
He gave it the necessary portion and left the rest for the silence, which was doing something.
"She's good," Victor said, finally.
"Yes."
"The Kelleher question. About Q1 staffing. She had the answer before he finished asking."
"She built the model," Garrett said. "She knows every variable in it."
"Most union organisers don't." Victor looked at the road. "Most union organisers know the emotional case. The human cost, the community impact. She knows those and the financial model and the contract law and the capacity specs of the machinery. That's unusual."
"She was a labour lawyer before CWA."
"I know. I looked her up this morning." A pause. "She could have stayed in law. The firms she interned at would have taken her."
"She chose this instead."
"Yes." Victor was quiet for a moment. "There are people who do things because they're good at them, and people who do things because they matter. She's in the second category. That's rarer than the first."
Garrett said nothing. He changed lanes for the O'Hare exit.
"The numbers at month three," Victor said.
"Will be clean."
"The Kelleher arrangement is renewable. If it renews at month twelve, the six-month board review becomes significantly easier to manage."
"I know."
"And if it doesn't renew."
"We cross that when we reach it." Garrett pulled into the departures lane. "The month-three numbers will be clean, Victor. The restructure is solid."
Victor picked up his bag from the footwell. He opened the door, then paused. "The six months," he said. "After that. What do you want to do."
The question was professional in its framing and not entirely professional in its content, which was characteristic of Victor at his most direct. Garrett looked at the departures entrance. "I want to see the restructure through," he said.
"That's not what I asked."
"I know." He met Victor's eyes. "I haven't decided yet."
Victor looked at him for a moment. Then he nodded, once, and got out of the car.
Garrett watched him go through the glass doors and then sat in the departures lane for a moment with the engine running and the traffic moving around him and the question hanging in the car where Victor had left it.
What do you want to do.
He had said he had not decided yet, which was true in the sense that he had not formed the decision into words and presented it to himself as a conclusion.
It was not true in the sense that the thing he wanted was not clear to him.
The thing he wanted had been clear since approximately the parking lot, possibly since the four o'clock meeting, possibly since the moment she walked through the door with her coffee and her canvas bag and her folder with the handwritten tabs and did not apologise for being three minutes late.
He pulled out of the departures lane and drove back toward the city.
He thought about what Victor had said about Cait: people who do things because they matter.
Victor had said it as an observation and Garrett had received it as one, but it was also, and Victor would have known this, a comment on the difference between them.
Garrett had chosen finance because he was good at it and because the work was difficult and because difficulty was the thing he had always oriented toward rather than away from.
He had not chosen it because it mattered to him in the way that Cait's work mattered to her.
He had chosen it the way his father had chosen architecture, for the craft of it, and then had practised it in a way his father would not have recognised.
He was thinking about that. He had been thinking about it, at intervals, since the first morning, since Cait had said: I wanted to be in the room before it happened.
Since Garza on the floor. Since the month-one numbers had come back clean and he had felt something he could not categorise as professional satisfaction and which he was beginning to understand was a different category entirely.
He did not have an answer. He had a direction, and the direction was the city ahead of him, which was going from afternoon to evening in the way Chicago did it, all at once, the light changing fast and the buildings going from grey to something warmer, and the West Loop visible in the middle distance with its converted warehouses and its good desks and its west-facing windows and, on Thursday evenings, the sound of someone who did not have to knock because he had given her the code the second time she came.
Toward the West Loop, which had a flat with a good desk and west-facing windows, and which was becoming, with a speed that bore examination, something he was thinking of as home.