James' phone rang at 10:47 a.m. He picked it up. "James Whitfield."
"James. Doug Halver."
James' eyebrows went up. He set his coffee cup down. "Doug."
"James, I need a favor."
"All right."
"It's a big one."
"All right."
"There is a young man named Elijah Booker who is going to walk into your dealership sometime in the next 2 hours. His mother's name is Patricia. I want you to do right by them, James. I want you to do righter by them than anybody has ever done right by anyone in your building. And I want you to send the invoice in full to my personal address, not the company. Mine. Do you understand me?"
James was silent for a long moment. "Doug."
"Yeah."
"What did one of your boys do?"
Doug Halvern, 63, sitting in a company Suburban that was doing 82 miles an hour up I-71 with a driver at the wheel, closed his eyes. "Something bad, James. Something real bad."
James nodded slowly. He picked his coffee back up. "You send them my way, Doug. I got him."
Doug Halvern arrived at Sunrise Motors of Ashcrust at 11:53 a.m. He came in through the front doors alone. He had left his driver in the Suburban. He was 63 years old, 5'10", thick around the middle, wearing a gray suit that had been cut for him in 2019 and had not quite kept up with him since. A white shirt open at the collar, no tie. His hair was white and thinning. His hands were the hands of a man who had spent the first 20 years of his working life turning wrenches and the last 30 signing papers, and they showed both.
He walked in through the sliding doors and stopped just inside them, the way Elijah had stopped just inside them 3 hours earlier, and he looked around the room. He saw Patricia and Elijah still sitting on the bench, though someone—Marcus probably—had brought them bottles of water and a plate of fruit from somewhere, and the water bottles were open and half empty, and the fruit was untouched. He saw Marcus standing quietly by the coffee bar. He saw Elena Ruiz over by the finance office door, laptop open, typing. He did not see Rick Delano. Rick Deleno was in his office. Rick Deleno would be in his office for the rest of the afternoon and possibly depending on what Doug decided over the next 48 hours, the rest of his career.
Doug did not go to Marcus first. He did not go to Elena first. He walked directly across the marble floor to the bench. He stopped 4 ft away. He did not extend his hand. He took his hands out of his pockets and let them hang at his sides.
"Miss Booker," he said, "my name is Douglas Halver. I am the founder and the chief executive officer of the company whose name is on the building you are sitting in. I have driven here from Cleveland to say four things to you and to your son and I would like to say them in the order I have prepared them if you will permit me. May I?"
Patricia looked at him for a long moment. "Yes, Mr. Halvern, you may."
Doug turned then to Elijah. He did not turn to Patricia. He turned to the boy and he took one step closer to the bench. And he did something that made Elena Ruiz, who had seen a great deal in her career, stop typing and look up. He lowered himself slowly onto one knee on the marble floor in front of the bench so that his face was below Elijah's face, so that the 18-year-old was looking down at the 63-year-old CEO of a $340 million company and not the other way around.
"Mr. Booker," Doug said, and his voice was rough. The voice of a man who had been rehearsing sentences in the back of a Suburban for 90 miles and was now finding at the moment of delivery that his prepared sentences were not going to be enough. "I am sorry. I am sorry, son. I am sorry for what a man wearing my name on his shirt said to you this morning. I am sorry for what he did to you. I am sorry that I have built a company for 36 years and I have not built it well enough that this could not happen inside it. That is my failure. It is not yours. You did nothing wrong today. You came in here the way a young man is supposed to come in: prepared, respectful, ready, and a person who works for me treated you the way no person should ever be treated inside a building I own. I am ashamed. I am not asking you to forgive me. I am not asking you to forgive him. I am asking you only to hear me say that I am sorry and to know that I mean it. And to know that I will be spending the rest of my time running this company making sure that no other young man ever sits on this bench for the reason you sat on it today. That is the first thing."
He paused. He did not stand up. He was still on one knee. Elijah's eyes were very bright. He did not speak. He did not need to. Patricia's hand on the bench between them had gone to her son's back, palm flat between his shoulder blades, and it was steady there.