"What does your attorney say you need? " he said. "Documentation. A clear record of the company's performance against its founding mission. Investor testimony. And" she paused.
"And he says I need to get in front of the board myself before the vote and make the case directly. Not through liaisons, not through intermediaries. Me in a room making the case. Can you do that? I've never not been able to make a case for what I believe in, she said.
That's never been the problem. A pause. The problem is I've been so busy managing everything around this fight that I haven't been in the fight itself. I've been responding. I need to stop responding and start preparing, Isaiah said.
A beat of silence. You said that to me once before. My wife said it to me first. Another silence, different in quality. Isaiah.
Her voice was quieter now. What do you do when the thing you built is being taken apart by people who should have been protecting it? He looked at the notebook on the table, at the columns of numbers, at the receipts from lumberyards and hardware stores, and the single gas station charge that he'd made 3 weeks ago with $16 in his account because the truck needed enough gas to get to the next job. You don't let them write the story of what it's worth, he said. You go to the people who were there at the beginning and you remind them why it mattered.
And then you walk into that room and you tell the truth so clean and so clear that anyone who's sitting on the fence has to decide if they're going to be the person who votes against what they know is right. A long pause. You should have been a lawyer, she said. I fix things, he said. Same skill set, worse shoes.
She almost laughed. Almost. Goodnight, Isaiah. Goodnight. He sat at the table for a while after the call.
He thought about the fence standing in the dark out on Harlan Ridge Road, 300 ft of it sealed and solid and finished holding what it was supposed to hold. He thought about Amelia Carter walking into a boardroom in 4 weeks to fight for something she'd built with her own hands. He thought about David Mercer, the cool, precise voice on the phone. That's a fair position. He thought about Patricia Osei, who had cried on a 40-minute call.
He thought about Grace saying, "This is my home. " with the total finality of someone who doesn't need the law to tell them where they belong. And then, his phone buzzed one more time. A text. Unknown number. He opened it.
Mr. Brooks, my name is Thomas Grant. I'm on the board of Carter Eco Construction. I understand you recently completed work on Ms. Carter's property.
I was hoping we could speak. I have some questions about what you observed while you were there. Isaiah read it twice. Then he put the phone face down on the table. He sat with the specific weight of that text, the way it had landed, the way it confirmed something he'd sensed all week without being able to name.
That the fight around Amelia Carter wasn't over. That it hadn't even fully started yet. That the fence was done, but the real repair was just beginning. And that somehow, in a way he hadn't planned or sought or fully understood yet, Isaiah Brooks was in the middle of it. He picked the phone back up.
He typed, "Mr. Grant, I'm a fence contractor. I'm not in a position to discuss my clients or their properties. If you have questions about structural work, I'm available for that. " He sent it. He turned off the kitchen light.
He checked on Ethan sleeping, one arm out, his face. The face of a child who has done all he can do today, and let the rest go with complete trust that someone is watching over the rest of it. Isaiah stood in the doorway and watched his son breathe for a moment. Then he went to bed. He didn't sleep for a long time.
But when he finally did, he slept hard, the sleep of a man who has held every line he was supposed to hold, who has not bent in the places that mattered, who has done the work in front of him, and refused the work that would have cost him who he was. The fence was done, and the next thing was coming fast. He could feel it the way you feel weather before it arrives, not in the air yet, but in something under the air, in the pressure of the world shifting toward what it's about to do. He was ready. The text from Thomas Grant was still on his phone the next morning when Isaiah woke up at 5:15.
He'd read it again before bed, read it again when he woke at 2:00 in the morning, the way he sometimes did that that wasn't anxiety exactly, but was his brain's way of telling him that something unresolved was sitting in the room with him. He'd read it a third time now in the gray pre-dawn sitting on the edge of his bed with his feet on the cold floor. He hadn't responded beyond that first reply. He wasn't going to. But he needed to tell Amelia about it, and he needed to do that before she walked into whatever the next several weeks were going to require of her without knowing that someone on her own board had tried to reach her contractor.
He texted her at 6:00. Simple. Direct. A board member named Thomas Grant contacted me last night. He said he had questions about what I observed at your property.
I told him I wasn't available for that conversation. Thought you should know. He put the phone down and started the coffee. Her reply came back in 4 minutes. 4 minutes at 6:00 in the morning meant she either hadn't slept or had been awake for a while.
Thomas Grant. He's one of the three swing votes. Thank you for telling me. And thank you for what you said to him. He poured his coffee and thought about Thomas Grant reaching out to a fence contractor at 9:47 at night.
That wasn't due diligence. That was desperation wearing a professional suit. A man trying to find a crack in something before he had to vote on it. Which meant Thomas Grant wasn't fully committed to the faction he was supposedly considering joining. Which meant he was still looking.
Which meant there was still something to reach. Isaiah didn't say any of that to Amelia. She'd see it herself. She was smart enough to have built a 240 person company from eight people and a mission statement. She didn't need a fence contractor to read her board members for her.
He dropped Ethan at school at 7:40, drove to the Millbrook hardware supplier to return the excess materials from the Carter job. Cedar posts. He hadn't needed two rails, a partial bag of post set concrete, and collected the credit against his account. $47. He noted it in the small notebook. Every dollar went in the notebook.
I was back on Sycamore Street by 9:15, sitting at the kitchen table with the Murfreesboro job folder open in front of him. Charles Whitfield had sent over photos of the building the previous afternoon. A 1920s commercial structure original brick facade, ground floor wood framing that had been modified three separate times by three separate owners who'd each made decisions that made sense to them at the time and compounding problems for everyone after. Isaiah had looked at the photos for a long time the night before. The kind of looking that was actually reading, reading the language of old wood and bad decisions and deferred maintenance and the places where someone had once tried to do the right thing and run out of either money or time.