15. Nell
NELL
I'd been awake for two days.
Day fourteen of nineteen, and we were badly behind. The qualification lot was due in five days and we still had thirty-five hundred units to finish. The machines had been running since five and it was past nine now and I'd stopped hearing them the way you stop hearing your own heartbeat.
Beckett's letter was in the drawer.
I'd read it once, the day it came. Weeks ago. It was a very good letter written by a man who is extremely good at documents. The ring had been in the envelope with it. I'd put both of them in the bottom drawer of the desk in the mill office and I hadn't touched either one since.
The numbers on the production sheet weren't changing fast enough.
Thirty-five hundred units. Five days. Two hundred washes per blanket, bound edge reinforcement, double-lock stitching on every seam.
I'd pulled Dorcas off her regular line to handle the binding and her shoulder was already showing the strain.
Ray had the machines running clean but that didn't matter if we couldn't feed them fast enough.
I picked up the pen and crossed out the old target. Wrote the new one. It didn't help.
My coffee had gone cold an hour ago. I drank it anyway.
The production numbers stared back at me from the page.
We'd finished five hundred units in the first fourteen days.
That left thirty-five hundred for the last five.
The math didn't work and I'd stopped pretending it would.
I'd started running the floor in two shifts three days ago and pulled myself onto nights to keep the line moving.
Hazel had come in this morning, looked at me, and said I looked like hell.
I'd told her I'd sleep when we shipped.
She'd looked at me the way she used to look at my mother when Mom came in on a fever and wouldn't go home.
I rubbed my eyes. The numbers didn't change.
Kiana knocked on the doorframe.
"Mrs Crowe? There's someone here to see you."
I looked up from the numbers. "I'm not taking visitors."
"He said you'd say that." She hesitated. "He said to tell you it's Winston Obi."
I put down the pen.
Winston Obi had spent twenty years making Beckett Crowe look better than he was. He ran the company, he ran the calendar, he ran the press, and when something needed explaining he explained it in a voice that made you feel stupid for asking. I knew exactly why he was here.
He was here to tell me that Beckett was sorry. That things had gotten complicated. That if I could just be patient a little longer everything would work itself out the way it always did.
I'd heard every version of that speech Winston knew how to give.
"Tell him I'm busy."
"I did." She shifted her weight. "He said he drove five hours and he'll wait."
"Five hours from where?"
"New York, he said."
I looked at the production sheet. At the numbers that weren't changing fast enough.
"Tell him I have five minutes."
"Yes ma'am."
Five hours. New York to Ardis. The same drive Beckett used to make when we were first married, when he'd close the workroom at midnight and get in the car and show up at my door at five in the morning with fabric samples and coffee that had gone cold somewhere around the state line.
That was six years ago.
Of course Winston would wait. Waiting was what he did. He waited for Beckett to finish. He waited for the press to settle. He waited for whatever small disaster was unfolding to resolve itself so he could smooth it over and make the schedule work again.
I didn't have time for any of it.
I stood up. My legs ached. Everything ached. I'd slept four hours in the last forty-eight and the coffee had stopped working around midnight. The floor was steady under my feet but it took effort to keep it that way.
"You want me to stay?" Kiana asked.
I looked at her. "No. Thank you."
"You sure? He looks like a lawyer."
"I'm sure. Send him in."
She left.
I didn't sit back down. I stayed where I was, standing beside the desk with the production sheet in front of me and the sound of Dorcas's line running clean through the wall. Thirty-five hundred units. Five days.
Whatever Winston Obi had driven five hours to say, it wasn't going to change that number.
Winston came through the door thirty seconds later in a wool coat and leather shoes that had never seen a mill floor.
He looked exactly the way he'd looked the last time I'd seen him, at a table in a glass house on a ridge forty minutes from here, when he'd told me Beckett was running late and asked if I wanted to start without him.
I didn't offer him a seat.
"Mr Obi."
"Mrs Crowe."
I waited.
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he set his briefcase down on the chair beside the door and didn't open it.
"You look tired," he said.
"I am. Day fourteen of nineteen and we're badly behind on a state contract. So unless you're here to tell me something that helps with that, I don't have time."
"I'm not here on behalf of the company."
"Then why are you here?"
He didn't answer right away.
I watched him choose his words the way I'd watched him choose them a hundred times before, in rooms where the lights were better and the stakes were somebody else's money. He was good at it. Beckett had hired him twenty years ago because he was good at it.
"Did Beckett send you?"
"No."
"Does he know you're here?"
"No."
Winston said it flat. Certain.
I looked at the briefcase on the chair. At the fact that he hadn't opened it.
"What's in the briefcase, Mr Obi?"
"Nothing that concerns you."
"Then why bring it?"
"Habit," he said.
Winston had smoothed over missed deadlines and delayed shipments and whatever small chaos ran underneath the gloss of Crowe's seasonal launches.
He'd stood beside Beckett at a hundred events and made sure the photographers caught the right angle.
He'd called me when my husband was running late and made it sound like a scheduling conflict instead of a choice.
And now he was standing in my mill office at nine in the morning on day fourteen of nineteen with a briefcase full of nothing and no company standing behind him.
He took a breath.
"Mrs Crowe. Can I say something that isn't my job? I'd like to say one thing and then I'll go."
I didn't sit down. I didn't move.
"Go ahead."
He didn't look away.
"The Sauveterre partnership was terminated at two in the morning on the nineteenth of September.
Beckett released the entire commercial record two weeks later.
Every invoice, every contract clause, every rider.
The princess's glamour turned out to be a billing sheet and a five-year exclusive for a wardrobe she hasn't paid for. "
I didn't say anything.
Two in the morning. The nineteenth of September. Two weeks before Talia walked onto my floor. Two weeks before I'd told him I wanted a divorce and walked out of the workroom with Talia's gown in my hands.
The machines were still running. I could hear them through the wall, the same rhythm they'd held since five this morning. Steady. Even.
Winston was still watching me. Waiting for me to react. To ask questions. To tell him this was impossible or that I didn't believe him.
"At two in the morning," I said.
"Yes."
"Two weeks before she came to my mill."
"Yes."
"And he terminated the partnership. Just like that."
"He sent the notice himself. Copied the board. Copied legal. It was done before anyone could stop him."
I looked at him. At the way he was standing there with nothing to defend and no case to make.
"Go on."
"The chief financial officer objected on paper and resigned the next day. The valuation halved inside a week. The Sauveterre money is gone and it's not coming back. The principality is suing for libel and will be for years."
He stopped.
I waited.
"The CFO objected on paper," I said.
"Yes."
"Which means he told Beckett not to do it."
"Yes."
"And Beckett did it anyway."
"Yes."
My hands found the edge of the desk. The wood was smooth under my palms, worn down by thirty years of other people's shifts before I ever walked into this building.
"What's the lawsuit worth?"
"Tens of millions. It'll take years to settle."
"And the valuation. You said it halved."
"In six days. The Sauveterre partnership was the growth story. When that collapsed, the market repriced everything."
"He resigned as chief executive. He gave up all controlling shares. And there's a press release announcing every word of it that I've been forbidden to issue until he says so. He hasn't said so."
The silence that followed was the kind that has weight.
"All controlling shares," I said.
"Yes."
"The company he built. That he's run for twenty years."
"Yes."
"And he won't let you announce it."
"No."
"Why not?"
"He won't say. He wrote the press release himself. Gave it to me three weeks ago and told me not to issue it until he gave the word."
"And he hasn't."
"No."
I looked at Winston. At the man standing in my office with no paper and no proof.
"When did he resign?"
"Three weeks ago."
"Three weeks."
"Yes."
"And you're telling me this now."
"I'm telling you this because I worked out the connection to your mill yesterday," Winston said. "And I got in the car this morning."
I looked at Winston Obi. At the man who had spent two decades making sure Beckett Crowe's life ran on time. Who had answered every call and managed every crisis and turned every mistake into a revised schedule.
He hadn't brought a single piece of paper with him.
No contracts. No financial statements. No press clippings. Nothing I could hold in my hands and check against a date or a filing or a public record.
Just his word.
From a man whose job had been to make Beckett look good.
"You drove five hours to tell me this."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Winston's jaw tightened. It was the first crack I'd seen in him since he'd walked through the door.
"Because one line of that disclosure named Ivester Woolen as a supplier to the heritage collection," Winston said. "And eleven days later the state put the hospital contract out to re-bid with independent testing and a qualification lot due in nineteen days."