Page 3

"Ms. Brewer, I'll take questions at the end."

"It's not a question. It's a correction."

He tilts his head, and something moves behind his eyes, interest or amusement, I can't tell which. "Humor me."

"Page six. Pike, Dolores. Redundant, role overlap. What's she overlapping with?"

"Loom maintenance and senior weaving. Two salaries, one function."

"We don't have a loom maintenance position. We cut it in 2019, when the last of the Whitcombs decided the Drapers would run on prayer. Dolores weaves her full shift, and every morning at five-thirty, before the lights are even on, she keeps those looms alive with a wrench and her own two hands, and nobody's paid her for it, which is a thing I'm going to fix. Those machines were built in 1946. There's no catalog. She makes the parts. If she goes, the Drapers are scrap by spring, and the Drapers are Bloomfield Blue, and Bloomfield Blue is the only thing on your whole spreadsheet that anyone outside this county wants to buy."

The room is so quiet I can hear the shuttles through the glass. Roman Caldwell looks at me for a long moment, and his smile doesn't fade so much as get put away.

"That is a fair point," he says, "and I'd like to look at it. In fairness, though—"

"Don't in-fairness me."

"The model is built on roles, not individuals, and with thirty-eight positions across eleven departments, some imprecision is—"

"Roles don't have mortgages."

"I appreciate the passion, Ms. Brewer, truly—"

"Don't."

It comes out lower than I mean it to, and it lands harder because of it. I don't remember putting my hand on the table, but it's there, flat.

"There's a man on the loading dock who put three kids through community college on what he makes here. There's a woman in payroll, sitting right there, who made sure my checks never missed a day while my father was dying. Two women who just came off the night shift are sitting in Mae's right now with their eggs going cold, wondering if they'll have a Monday. There's a hundred and forty people in this building, and every one of them is somebody's whole Tuesday, and you've got them in a column called efficiency." My voice cracks on the last word and I run straight over the crack. "I'm a single mother, Mr. Caldwell. My daughter is nine. A kid told her at recess yesterday that this place was closing, and she asked me to promise it wasn't, and I couldn't, because of men like you who walk in at seven-thirty in a coat like that and call it a plan. She'll come through that door at three-fifteen with her backpack and half a granola bar, because Fridays are mill days, and she knows what the kitchen table sounds like at midnight when the numbers don't work. So before you put your name on this, I want you to look at their faces."

He's looking at mine.

That's the problem. I've said every word to the room, and he's the only one in it who hasn't looked away from me.

His eyes are the gray-green of river water in March. His gaze drops once, to my mouth, and returns so fast I could have invented it. My throat goes hot. The heat climbs into my cheeks with the traitorous speed of a face that has never once learned to keep a secret, and I lose the end of my own sentence somewhere between his collar and his jaw.

Nobody moves. Down on the floor the plaid goes by.

"We'll take ten minutes," Roman says. His voice has dropped out of the pleasant register he walked in with. It's plainer now, and it scares me more. "Get coffee. Eat something."

They leave in a hush, folders clutched to their chests. The woman from payroll touches my arm as she passes, one light press. Dolores is last. She stops at the door and looks at Roman, then at me. "Mr. Caldwell. She's right about the Drapers. She's usually right about the Drapers." Then she shuts the door behind her with a click that sounds like a verdict.

It's the two of us and the glass. He hasn't moved from the head of the table, and I haven't moved from the door.

"Well," he says. "I'm generally the least popular man in any room by nine o'clock. By my watch it's seven forty-one."

"Don't tell me you're charmed. I'm angry at you."

"I'm aware." He comes around the table, not fast, one hand trailing along the wood as if the table's something he's decided to like. "That's what's interesting. I've been told no before. Never before I finished asking. Never with a source."

"I'm not a source. I'm the operations manager."

"You're the first person in a decade to tell me I was wrong, in front of an audience, and then be right." He stops an arm's length away, close enough that I can smell him, cold air and something clean and expensive, the mill's wool-and-steam already working its way into it. "Show me."

"Show you what?"

"Everything. The names. The faces. The Drapers. If my model is wrong, I want to see exactly how it's wrong, and I don't think I can do it from a spreadsheet." His eyes stay on mine. "You said to look at their faces. I'm asking you to show me."

"You're doing something with your face right now."