Chapter 20: The Rockford Offer

Nick's POV

The Pruden Cold Chain yard sat behind a chain-link fence on the south side, under a sky the color of dishwater.

Four hundred trucks were parked across the gate.

They had been backed in nose to tail, cab doors open, engines off. Nobody was shouting.

That was what scared me.

I had seen this once before, at twelve years old, outside a loading dock in Rockford.

I had stood next to my father while a hundred men in work jackets watched a stranger approach.

The stranger wore a good suit and carried a clipboard.

Leigh stopped the car at the curb and looked at the trucks.

"What do I say?" she asked.

"The truth."

"I've been practicing it for three days. It keeps coming out as a legal brief."

"Then say it badly."

She got out.

She wore the same gray suit as the day before.

On her feet were flat shoes I had bought at a drugstore at six that morning.

She had accepted them without comment.

She walked up to the gate with her hands open at her sides.

The men and women on the trucks went quiet in a wave.

A woman about my mother's age came forward from the line.

She wore a canvas jacket and had short gray hair.

She had the face of someone who had argued with management for thirty years.

"You're the wife," she said. "Or the girlfriend. Or whoever it's supposed to be."

"I'm Leigh Stannard."

"The dispatch supervisor said you own the company."

"My family's fund holds a loan secured by most of it. As of five o'clock yesterday, we hold the shares."

"What does that mean for my drivers?"

Leigh took a breath.

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