Chapter Thirty-Seven
Garrett
Victor called on a Wednesday, which was not his usual day, which meant the answer had taken the shape it was going to take and he did not want to hold it until Thursday.
Garrett was at his desk in the room at the end of the corridor when the call came through. He picked up on the second ring.
"The Midwest portfolio role," Victor said.
"Yes."
"The board approved the structure last week.
I've been working through the specifics before I came back to you.
" A pause with something careful in it. "Chicago-based.
Quarterly presence in New York. Salary adjusted for the geographic differential, which in practice means an increase because Chicago is not Manhattan but the role is larger than your current one. "
Garrett set his pen down. "Scope."
"Manufacturing, logistics, and adjacent sectors in the Midwest corridor.
Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan. You'd be the senior presence on the ground for any acquisition or restructure in that region.
New York provides analytical support and board liaison.
" Victor paused. "You'd have significant autonomy. More than you have now."
"Reporting structure."
"To me. Same as now, functionally. With the understanding that the distance changes the day-to-day." Another pause. "I've been thinking about what you said in February. About the board and the commitment and what kind of firm we are. I didn't tell you at the time, but it landed."
Garrett was quiet for a moment. Outside the window, the secondary parking lot in late March: the ice entirely gone now, the tarmac dry, a thin green coming in at the edges where the lot met the fence.
"Victor."
"The Meridian deal changed how I'm thinking about the region.
You were right that we were missing things by not having presence here.
The Crestline situation clarified that: someone else was ready to buy what we'd built because they understood the value we'd created better than our own board initially did.
" His voice was dry. "That's not a position I intend to be in again. "
"No."
"The role starts when the liaison term ends. May fifteenth." A pause. "I'm assuming this means you'll be keeping the flat."
"Yes," Garrett said.
"Good. The desk is sound, I take it."
"The desk is excellent."
"Then there's nothing else to discuss." Victor's voice shifted, almost imperceptibly, into something slightly less formal. "I hope it works out, Garrett. The thing you're staying for. I hope it's worth staying for."
"It is," Garrett said.
They hung up.
He sat in the room at the end of the corridor for a moment, looking at nothing in particular, the way he sat when something had resolved and he was taking the shape of the resolution before moving.
The Midwest portfolio role. Chicago-based.
The flat with the good desk and the west-facing windows, which was no longer a temporary arrangement.
He thought about his father, who had drawn buildings for forty years in the belief that the best thing you could do with a working life was make something that stood up, something people walked into and felt differently for having been in.
He had not understood, until Meridian, what his father meant by differently.
He had thought it was aesthetic: the quality of light in a well-designed room, the proportions that made a space feel right.
He understood now that his father meant something more fundamental than aesthetics.
He meant the feeling of being in a place that had been built with intention, that had been put together by someone who had decided it mattered.
The Midwest portfolio role was the first thing Garrett had built with intention rather than with precision.
He had built it because the data supported it and because Chicago had become real to him and because the woman in the small office had shown him the difference between a number and a fact.
He had built it because he was staying, and he was staying because the want and the direction had resolved into the same thing and he was not going to stand in the way of that.
He picked up his phone. He did not text Cait. He got up and walked down the corridor and knocked on the open door of the small office.
She looked up from her laptop. She read his face in the second before he said anything, which was one of her skills he had understood from the first morning and which still, four months later, had the capacity to catch him off guard.
"Yes," she said. Before he said it.
"Yes," he confirmed.
She looked at him for a moment. Then she picked up the chipped green cup and drank the last of what was in it, which was cold, which she did the way she had done the first morning: without complaint, because the coffee was there and she was not going to waste it. She set the cup down.
"Tonight," she said. "West Loop. I'll cook this time."
He had not known she cooked. He was still finding out things he had not known. "All right," he said.
"Go back to work," she said. Not unkindly.
He went back to work. He did not accomplish a great deal of it for the remainder of the morning, which was unusual, and which he attributed to a form of happiness he had not had cause to budget for in some time.