Chapter 9: Easy

Caleb's POV

I had one rule at work, and Lena had made me swear to it over eggs: don't go easy on her.

By nine on Tuesday morning I had broken it.

The finance committee met in the small boardroom on four.

It had a table for eight and a screen that never showed the right colors.

Lena stood at the screen in a charcoal suit with her hair pinned up and a laser pointer in her hand.

She was magnificent.

I mean that as a fact.

She had the Hartwell budget memorized.

She walked the committee through it line by line.

She never looked at her notes, and she never raised her voice.

Paul Whitaker sat across from me with his rimless glasses and his pleasant smile.

He had been the company's CFO for twenty years.

He was the only man in the building whose smile I had never trusted.

"Lena, I admire the ambition," he said, when she reached the last slide.

"But the freight line seems optimistic. Perhaps we should trim the showroom by a third and revisit in spring."

I knew the answer.

I'd known it for two weeks.

Now Whitaker was circling the budget again, and this time I wasn't going to hide behind a pencil note.

I opened my mouth to defend it.

Whitaker smiled at me as though he had already won something.

My hands were flat on the table, and every instinct I had said to stand up and take the number back from him.

I could feel Whitaker waiting to see which of us would blink.

Lena looked at me.

It was a short, level glance, and it said: don't you dare.

I closed my mouth.

"Paul," she said, turning back to the table.

"If we trim the showroom by a third, we lose the design floor, and that is where the margin is."

She put the Cincinnati store comparison on the screen.

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