Chapter Four #2
Toby nodded. Made a note on his phone the way he always did when something was decided. "One more thing," he said at the door.
"Always."
"Daisy knows about the will. She's been running interference for eighteen months, which you know, and as of this morning she's also aware that you went to the seventh-floor coffee cart and that you asked Pete, the contractor, how early the designer usually started, which Pete apparently mentioned to Daisy because everyone in this building tells Daisy everything.
" He paused, the door half open. "She wanted you to know she thinks it's the first good idea you've had in a while, and that if you manage to ruin it by being emotionally avoidant about it, she will reorganize your calendar as a corrective measure. "
"Tell Daisy I value her perspective."
"I will tell Daisy you said exactly that and she will not believe me." He left, the door clicking shut with the particular quiet of someone who'd made his point and was content to let it sit.
Tristan stood in the office that still had no name on the door, the company running around him through walls and floors and a board meeting he had eleven weeks to prevent from going the wrong way, and he thought about honesty.
About what it cost to offer it first, without knowing what you'd get back.
About how long he'd spent in rooms where honesty was a negotiating position rather than a starting point and how tired that had made him, in the slow accumulated way that only becomes visible when you stop.
He found her the next morning on the seventh floor, at the coffee cart Daisy had correctly identified, with a cardboard cup in her hand and a pencil behind her ear and a rolled floor plan under her arm, waiting for her order with the focused distraction of someone already three conversations ahead of the one she was standing in.
She was wearing a dark green jacket over a cream shirt, her hair pulled back the way it always was on the job site, and she was frowning at something on her phone in the particular way that meant she was looking at something that needed solving and was already halfway to the solution.
He joined the queue behind her. Waited.
She turned when the cart attendant called her order and found him two feet away, which made her blink, then settle, the way she settled into unexpected things.
"You're not on fourteen," she said.
"Neither are you."
"I'm getting coffee."
"So am I." He picked up his own order. Looked at her steadily, the way he'd been practicing for sixteen hours. "I was wondering if you had a few minutes this morning. Off the floor. Somewhere quieter."
She studied him the way she studied floor plans, full inventory, nothing skimmed. "Is this about the structural column I missed?"
"No."
"The supply closet access? Daisy said she'd have the key by yesterday and it wasn't there when I left."
"That's on me. I'll fix it today. But that's not what this is about."
"Then what?"
He held the door open. The morning was cool and the city was doing its full-voice thing, the river two blocks over, a bus somewhere on Wacker, someone laughing near the entrance to the parking garage.
He had gone through a dozen versions of this conversation in the last sixteen hours and all of them had dissolved now into something simpler, the same way a floor plan simplified once you stopped trying to make it everything and let it be what the space actually needed.
"My name is on the building," he said.
She looked at him. Waited.
"Tristan Burke. Not operations. Not project coordination.
" He said it evenly, without apology, without performance.
"I've been running the company without the title for eighteen months, by choice, for reasons I can explain properly over breakfast if you'll let me.
I should have told you at the pitch. I didn't, and that was the wrong call, and I'm telling you now because what I want to ask you requires you to have the full picture. "
She was very still. Not shocked, he thought. Processing. Filing. Recalibrating in the way she recalibrated when she'd gotten information wrong and needed to update her read of the room.
"The building," she said. "Burke Holdings."
"Yes."
"You own it."
"I'm in the process of inheriting it, with conditions.
Which is related to what I want to ask you.
" He met her eyes, held them. "I know about the visa.
Toby Hendricks handles my legal. He flagged a potential conflict, which doesn't exist, but it meant he told me about your situation.
Eight weeks from now you need a solution. "
Her face moved briefly, something that wasn't quite surprise and wasn't quite not. "You know."
"Yes. And I have a proposal. A real one, with documentation and legal protections and a clear end date and full transparency about what I'm working with.
It solves your problem and it solves mine, and neither of us has to pretend it's something it isn't." He paused.
"The contract is yours regardless of what you decide. I need you to know that first."
She looked at him for a long moment. The pencil behind her ear.
The floor plan under her arm. The coffee going slightly cooler in her hand while she took the full measure of what was in front of her, which was, he was coming to understand, simply how she operated.
She did not rush decisions. She took inventory first.
"Full picture," she said at last.
"Everything. Starting from the beginning."
She looked at her coffee. Then back at him.
"There's a place on Wacker that does proper eggs. Not the hotel kind. Real ones."
"I know it."