He had the particular stillness of a man who had already made his decision before she walked into the room and was simply waiting for the conversation to finish so he could return to packing his tools. "I'm Leona Pierce," she said. I know, he said. Then he turned back to his clipboard. She thought about that moment for two days afterward.
Not because it was remarkable on its surface. She had met plenty of men who played at indifference who understood that the appearance of not wanting something was often the most effective way to obtain it. Victor Kesler had written the manual on that particular approach. But Nolan Ree had not felt like a man playing at anything. He had felt like a man who had someplace else to be.
She asked her operations director to pull his company file. Reese Technical Services, six years in business based out of a rented workshop in Sodo, two full-time employees besides himself, three part-time contractors. The file noted he had been responsive, technically thorough, and had turned down a previous offer to be added to Oralene's preferred vendor list without explanation. She found the explanation when she read the contract terms that had been attached to that offer. An exclusivity clause.
If he'd signed it, Reese Technical Services would have been dependent on Oralene for the majority of its operating revenue. She had not written that clause, but she understood immediately why he had refused it. On the third day, she called her director of operations. Draw up a new maintenance contract for Reese Technical Services, she said. Multi-propy scope, remove the exclusivity clause, and make the rate generous.
The offer was delivered by Courier the following morning. It was refused by noon. Nolan called the operations director directly to decline, which she appreciated. He hadn't left it to an email. The director relayed the message to Leona verbatim.
The scope was too broad for his current staffing, and taking on that volume of work from a single client would put him in effectively the same position as the exclusivity clause he'd declined before, just without the contractual language to make it obvious. Leona read the message twice. Then she went down to the loading dock where, according to the schedule, he was finishing a final walkthrough before signing off on Harborest's technical handover. He saw her coming and did not appear surprised. He was holding a tablet reviewing something on the screen and he did not put it down when she stopped a few feet away.
You turned down the contract, she said. I did. That contract could have stabilized your company for the next 3 years. It could have. He agreed.
It also would have meant that if Oralene ever decided to renegotiate or cut costs or bring maintenance in house. My company lives or dies based on your decision. That's not stability. That's dependency with better paperwork. Leona looked at him for a moment.
Most contractors would call that a good problem to have. Most contractors aren't running a sixperson operation where one bad quarter means people don't get paid. He set the tablet down against the wall. I'm not turning down the work because I don't need it. I'm turning it down because I'm not willing to let one client decide whether my company survives.
She had heard people talk about independence before. Usually, it sounded like pride. When Nolan said it, it sounded like arithmetic. "What if the terms were renegotiated?" she asked. "I'd read the new terms," he said.
It was not a yes, but it was the first thing he had said to her that wasn't a no. Nolan Ree drove home that evening to a two-bedroom apartment in Beacon Hill, up a stairwell that smelled faintly of the Thai restaurant on the ground floor. He pushed open the door to find Sadi at the kitchen table, surrounded by graph paper and three different colored pens, constructing what appeared to be a map of an imaginary island. She was 11 years old and had her mother's eyes and his stubbornness, a combination that had not gotten easier to manage as she'd gotten older. "How was the fancy hotel?" she asked without looking up.
"Elect electrical panel needed rewiring," he said. "Fixed it." "Did they give you the check?" "They tried to give me extra." She looked up then. "Did you take it?" "No." She considered this, then returned to her map. Derek's dad says you're bad at business. Derek's dad filed for bankruptcy twice, Nolan said, opening the refrigerator.
Leftovers top shelf. I made rice. He heated the food sat across from her and watched her work. She had her mother's precision with the pen, clean lines, no second guessing. He had always found something steady about watching Sadi do anything that required concentration.
It reminded him that some things were still simple. He had not told her how close the numbers were. She was 11 and some arithmetic was not hers to carry, but she was also her mother's daughter, which meant she noticed more than she let on. And he suspected she knew more than he'd said. He owed $64,000 on equipment.
He had lost two commercial accounts in the past 4 months, one to a larger firm that had underbid him, one to a client who had simply closed their business without warning. What remained in the operating account would cover payroll and rent for six more weeks, maybe eight if he was careful. He had spent the better part of the last year being careful. He was tired of being careful. But he was more tired of the alternative of owing something to someone, of waking up in the morning and knowing that his ability to keep the lights on for the people who worked for him depended on a relationship he hadn't chosen and couldn't fully control.
He thought about the woman from Oralene. He thought about her for a few seconds, then he stopped. She found him at the sandwich shop on Second Avenue on a Tuesday. She had asked the week before where he usually ate lunch when he was working near the waterfront. He had told her a corner place, nothing special, good pastrami, with the air of someone answering a question that didn't seem worth examining too closely.