Sadi seemed to weigh something. Then she returned to her book. After they dropped Sadi at the apartment and Nolan came back down to the truck, Leona sat quietly for a moment. "She's watching very carefully," Leyona said. "She always does," Nolan said.
"She gets it from her mother. He said it simply without weight. The way people say things they have made peace with, even if the peace was hard to arrive at. Leona looked out the window at the gray October street. I'll be careful, she said.
I know, he said. That's why I let her meet you. She found out about the debt from her head of vendor relations, who pulled the file on Reese Technical Services as part of a routine audit of active contractors. Two missed equipment payments, a landlord notice, a window of 4 to 6 weeks before the situation became irreversible. She sat with the information for most of a day before she did anything with it.
What she did not sit with because she had already known it was coming and had not expected it to land as hard as it did was the detail buried in the same file Oralene's procurement team had sent Ree Technical Services a subcontracting offer four weeks ago of project specific engagement worth $180,000 routed down after she had asked a passing question about whether there was any way to get him more volume without the exclusivity problem. He had declined it. The same day she drove to the workshop. He was closing up for the evening, rolling down the main door when she pulled up. He took one look at her face and did not pretend not to know why she was there.
You pulled our vendor file. He said, "My team did." She said, "It's a standard audit." And now you're here. Now I'm here. She said, "Nolan, you're four weeks away from losing the lease." About that, yes. And you turned down $180,000.
I did. She looked at him in the sodium light of the parking lot, the frustration she had been holding all day, finally rising into something she couldn't quite modulate. "I need you to explain to me," she said, how this makes sense. "You have a daughter. You have employees.
You have I know what I have, he said. Then why? Because I know what I'd owe. His voice was even but not quiet. It carried the particular weight of someone saying something they had thought about carefully and completely.
If I take that contract 6 months from now, I'm not Nolan Ree who runs a good shop. I'm the guy Leona Pierce brought on because she's covering for him. And even if nobody says it out loud, I'll know it and you'll know it. And whatever this is between us, he gestured between them, it'll have that underneath it. Every conversation, every disagreement, every time things get hard.