When Love Runs Dry novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Case Study

Delaney presents Meredith's own old plan as her turnaround and fires plant operator Nolan for refusing to skip a repair, until Meredith asks who wrote page 14 and Tobias tears into the lot with the divorce decree.

Delaney looked at my Subaru, then at me, and her smile got wider.

"Oh my God. Meredith?"

She said it.

"What are you doing here? Is Tobias with you?"

"No."

"Did you drive all the way up here in that?" She tilted her head at my car. "That's so brave."

Nolan looked from her to me.

He set his travel mug on the gatepost.

"You two know each other," he said flatly.

"Everybody knows Meredith," Delaney said. "She's sort of part of the house."

Two more cars pulled in behind her. Black sedans.

Four men and a woman got out in matching quarter-zip vests.

Spaulding Capital, stitched on every chest.

"Okay, team!" Delaney clapped. "Welcome to Alder Falls, our first case study come to life!"

She swept past Nolan.

I parked and followed them in.

Nobody stopped me. Nobody looked at me long enough to.

The plant smelled like chlorine and wet concrete, exactly the way it had when I was twenty-three.

The same green pumps. The same gauges on the wall. One of them was still cracked.

The control room had a long table now, and a screen on a cart.

Delaney put up a slide.

ALDER FALLS: A HIDDEN-YIELD TURNAROUND. D. TRUESDELL.

"So this is the plan I built for my thesis," she said. "And Spaulding loved it so much, they bought the whole company."

The analysts laughed.

She clicked.

My intake drawing filled the screen.

My handwriting was still in the corner of it, where she'd forgotten to crop.

She clicked again.

My flow tables. My pipe map. My load figures, page 14, every number.

The pages about repairs were gone.

All of them.

"Revenue goes up a hundred and forty percent in year one," Delaney said. "Labor goes down by half."

"We defer all capital spending, and we exit in three years at three times the price."

"Defer," I said from the doorway. "You mean skip."

Every head turned.

Delaney's eyes went big and sorry.

"Guys, this is Meredith. Tobias's..." She made a little helpless face. "She's sort of the furniture. Don't mind her."

One of the analysts snorted.

Nolan was standing by the pump-room door with his arms folded.

He didn't laugh.

Delaney turned to him with her clipboard.

"Mr. Wadsworth, right? I saw an intake valve repair on the schedule for next week. Postpone it."

"No."

She blinked. "Sorry?"

"That valve's been sticking since August. The contractor's coming Tuesday. If it seizes, nothing comes into this plant. The whole town goes dry."

"It's been fine for a hundred years."

"It's been fixed for a hundred years. That's why it's been fine."

The analysts went very interested in their phones.

"We're not spending forty thousand dollars on a valve in the first quarter," Delaney said sweetly. "Postpone it."

"I'm not signing that."

"Then you don't work here."

The room went still.

Nolan looked at her for a long moment.

"I've run this plant for nine years," he said.

"And now you don't." She smiled. "Your two guys, too. The tall one and the one with the beard."

"Spaulding has a contractor for all of it now. Please leave your keys at the desk."

He unclipped a ring of keys from his belt.

He set it on the table in front of her, very gently.

Then he walked out through the pump room without saying another word.

Through the window I watched him cross the yard to two men by a truck.

He said something. One of them threw his hard hat at the fence.

Delaney turned back to her screen.

"So!" she said. "Page 14. Our demand model."

My demand model.

I'd counted every meter in town by hand, the winter I was twenty-four. I'd sat in Opal's office with frozen fingers and a calculator.

"Where did those numbers come from?" I asked.

Delaney's smile flickered.

"I'm sorry?"

"Page 14. Peak load for 2,300 accounts. Where did you get it? Who measured it?"

"It's a standard model."

"It isn't. There's a correction on line six for the cannery that closed in 2019. Why is that there?"

She opened her mouth.

She looked at her slide.

She didn't know. She'd never known.

"You can't say," I said. "I can. I wrote them."

The analysts stopped scrolling.

"That's my plan. I wrote it five years ago, when I was this company's engineer."

"It's filed at town hall with my signature and the date on it."

"That's insane," Delaney said. Her voice went up an octave. "You're a housewife."

"I'm a licensed civil engineer. You found my plan in my husband's study, and you cut out every page that costs money."

One of the analysts looked down at his printed copy.

At the bottom corner of page 14, half cropped, you could still read it.

M. BRAI.

He looked at Delaney.

She snatched the copy out of his hands.

Then an engine roared outside, much too fast for a gravel lot.

Everybody went to the window.

A black Mercedes skidded in sideways and stopped a foot from my Subaru.

Tobias got out before his driver could.

His arm was still in the sling.

In his good fist was a sheaf of paper with a court seal on top.

He saw me through the glass.

He crossed the yard, banged through the door, and held the paper up in front of everyone.

"You divorced me?"

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