He pressed his thumb into the new wood, the treated wood, the sealed old wood that had been worth keeping. Everything held. I was loading his truck for the final time when Amelia came out of the house. She was off the phone. She looked like someone who had spent the morning in a fight and was still standing, which was its own kind of victory.
She walked to the fence and stood in front of it without saying anything for a moment. "It's done," he said. "Yes. " She looked at it the way you look at something you thought might be gone forever and then wasn't. "It's done. The new sections need another coat in the spring.
Light maintenance. Everything else should hold for years. " She nodded. She wasn't looking at the fence anymore. She was looking at him. "David called you," she said.
He paused. "His assistant did. " "What did she say? " "That he had investment properties he wanted me to look at. That he wanted to meet this afternoon. Here. " Amelia was very still. "What did you say? " "I said if he wanted to discuss a project, he could call my business line. " She looked at him for a long time.
Long enough that he found himself holding steady under it the way you hold steady under something that has weight. "He was trying to get to me," she said. Not a question. "That was my read. He does that, uses people. " She said it without bitterness, which was somehow harder to hear than bitterness would have been.
"He doesn't think of it as using. He thinks of it as gathering resources, as being efficient. " She looked back at the fence. "He's been calling people I work with for months. My VP of investor relations, as it turns out, has been having off-calendar conversations with David's team since July. " Isaiah stopped loading. "You know that now.
Margaret Holloway told me she received an unsolicited call from someone on David's team 6 weeks ago asking questions about my leadership during the early years. She didn't say anything because she didn't realize what was being built. Amelia paused. Until I called her this morning. He closed the truck bed, turned to face her fully.
How many of the five original investors have you reached? All five by 11:00. She held up her hand and counted. Margaret is already working on the swing votes. Two others, a man named Robert Chen and a woman named Diane Abrams, said they'd been wondering why nobody was calling them.
Robert was angry. The good kind of angry. The corner of her mouth moved. Diane said she'd been waiting for someone to ask her to do something and she was glad someone finally had. And the other two?
Amelia's face shifted slightly. One of them told me to call back next week, which I'll interpret charitably. The last one. She stopped. He said he appreciated my call but that he'd already had conversations with people who'd given him concerns about the current direction of the company.
David's people. Almost certainly. Isaiah leaned against the truck. Four out of five is a lot of people who want you to stay. It might not be enough.
The board moves in 4 weeks. I need the swing votes. She folded her arms across herself, not in a defensive way, more like holding herself together while she thought. Patricia Osay is the one that genuinely hurts. I recruited her.
I sat across from her at a restaurant in Nashville 8 years ago and told her what I was building and what I believed in and she looked at me and said, "I believe you. " And now she's Amelia stopped. Now she's the one who moved the vote up. Did you call her? A long pause. No.
Why not? Because I don't know what to say to her. The truth. She looked at him. I said the truth to her 8 years ago and she believed me.
Now she's voting against me and I don't know what the truth changed or when or why. And I'm afraid that if I call her and she says it's too late, I won't She stopped herself again, looked at the fence, then at him. What did you do? She said carefully. When the hospital told you the treatment wasn't working.
The question hit him in the sternum. He was quiet for a moment. I sat in a parking garage for 2 hours, he said. And then I went back inside. Why?
Because she was still in there. Amelia breathed in, out, the cold air taking it. Call Patricia, he said. She nodded once and went back inside. He sat in his truck and didn't start the engine for a few minutes.
He looked at the fence from the windshield, the whole line of it, the new posts yellow against the gray, the rails clean and true. He thought about Sandra saying stop performing and start preparing. He thought about the way Amelia had looked just now right before she went back inside. Not beaten, not defeated. Something harder than that.
The look of someone making a choice that might not work and making it anyway. He started the truck. He was a mile down Harlem Ridge Road when his phone rang. It was a local number he'd seen before but couldn't immediately place. He answered.
Mr. Brooks. A man's voice carefully modulated. This is David Mercer. Isaiah let a beat pass.
Mr. Mercer, I understand my assistant reached out earlier. I wanted to follow up personally. A pause dying to feel collegial. You did impressive work out here.
Anyone can see that. I wanted to make sure you knew there were real opportunities if you wanted them. I appreciate that. I'm talking significant work, not fence repairs. I have three commercial properties in this county that need structural assessment and restoration.
That's months of contracted work, stable income. Another pause. For the right person. Isaiah drove. The truck rattled over a pothole.
The toolbox knocked in the back. Mr. Mercer, he said, I'm going to be straight with you. Please. I'm not for sale in the way you're thinking about buying.