By Tuesday, THE JAR held forty-one dollars, and thirty of them were Kevin's.
He could not stop. The word was too deep in him. It came out in hallways, in emails, in the middle of unrelated sentences about the printer. Every time, there was a distant cluck from the CFO's office, and Kevin would close his eyes and reach for his wallet.
"He's going to go broke," Bev said, watching him trudge to the jar for the fourth time before ten o'clock.
"He's going to fund the best holiday party in Ohio," I said.
Bev and I had become, in the space of a day, fixtures on the fourth floor. Kevin had given us a third badge that said HONORARY NORTHGATER, which Bev wore upside down. We had a desk near the kitchen. People brought us muffins.
I was not there for muffins. I was there because a forty-nine-year-old woman could not get through a staff meeting without sounding like a barnyard. And it was my fault. And I had until Friday.
Tuesday morning I tried a guided relaxation in Ingrid's office. She lay on her couch with her eyes closed while I talked about a warm beach. After six minutes she said, "What's the beach's occupancy rate?" and sat up.
Tuesday afternoon I tried a white noise machine Bev bought at a pharmacy. Ingrid listened to "Ocean" for thirty seconds and asked if we could switch it off, because it sounded like a toilet that wouldn't stop running. We tried "Rain." She said it reminded her of a roof claim from 2014.
Wednesday morning Bev had an idea.
"What bores her?" she asked.
"Nothing bores her," I said. "She reads tax code for fun."
"Something must." Bev turned to Ingrid. "What's the most boring thing in this building?"
Ingrid thought about it seriously. "Kevin's quarterly engagement survey results."
Kevin, passing the door, looked wounded.
So I read Ingrid all forty pages of the engagement survey results, slowly, in my best induction voice. Ingrid sat on her couch with her eyes closed.
At page twelve, I felt the room go soft and warm. At page thirteen, I heard a gentle, even breathing.
It was not Ingrid. It was Bev. She had fallen asleep in the corner chair with a sunflower seed halfway to her mouth.
Ingrid opened one eye. "Is that your sister?"
"Yes."
"Four thousand times, and she never went under?"
"So she says."
Ingrid looked at Bev for a long, thoughtful moment. Then she closed the eye again. "Keep reading," she said. "Page fourteen has a chart I disagree with."
Something else was happening on the fourth floor that week. It took me until Wednesday to notice it.
People were talking to Ingrid.
Not about budgets, and not in the careful voice people use with whoever approves their expenses. They were stopping by her door. They were leaning on the frame. They were asking how she was holding up.
The first one was a junior analyst named Danny Okoro. He was twenty-six and had worked at Northgate for two years. In that time, he told me, he had spoken to Ingrid exactly twice. Both times he had apologized for things that were not his fault.
On Wednesday he knocked on her open door with a spreadsheet. He was visibly sweating.
"Ms. Thorne, sorry, I know you're busy. I think there's a discrepancy in the Q3 vendor costs."
He swallowed. "It might just be a, um, synergy thing between departments—"
Bawk.
Danny went white. He looked as if he had just reversed his car into a police officer.
And then Ingrid laughed.
It was not a big laugh, more of a short surprised exhale, like air escaping a tire. But her shoulders shook, and she covered her face with one hand. Danny stared at her. Then, slowly, helplessly, he started laughing too.
"I'm so sorry," he gasped.
"Don't be." Ingrid wiped her eyes. "You're right about the vendor costs. Sit down."
He sat down. They went through the spreadsheet together for forty minutes. When he came out, he walked past my desk in a sort of trance. It was a better trance than any I had produced all week.
"She called me 'Daniel,'" he said. "She said my formula was elegant."
By Thursday morning, there was a small ceramic hen on Ingrid's desk. Nobody admitted to buying it. It was yellow, with a red comb and a look of quiet dignity.
Ingrid did not remove it. She used it as a paperweight for the Apexion file.
That same Wednesday, Kevin came into Ingrid's office to run through Friday's slides with her. I was in the corner, practicing my snap. It had progressed from a raindrop on a paper plate to a raindrop on a slightly firmer paper plate.
Bev was in the other corner, eating seeds.
"Okay," Kevin said, clicking to slide four. "So here's where we show the cross-team synerg— oh no."
Bawk.
At precisely the same instant, Bev had a coughing fit. A real one, loud and sudden, doubled over in her chair with her face in the seed bag. It went on for several seconds.
"Are you all right?" I asked.
"Seed," Bev wheezed. "Wrong pipe. I need some air." She left the room with her bag clutched to her chest.
Kevin walked to THE JAR in the hallway. I went back to practicing my snap and didn't think about it again. I wish now that I had.
The real turn came on Thursday, at two in the afternoon.
Apexion had requested a pre-meeting video call. Just a "quick alignment," Trent Whitlow's assistant wrote, before the big presentation on Friday. Gordon would be on it. So would Kevin and Ingrid.
"You don't have to join," Gordon told her.
"I'll join," said Ingrid. "I'll stay on mute."
Bev and I watched from the back of the conference room, out of camera range. The big screen flickered on, and there was Trent Whitlow.
He was forty-four, with very white teeth and a quarter-zip pullover in a shade I can only describe as venture-capital blue.
He was wearing a headset microphone, the thin kind that curves along the cheek. He was alone in what appeared to be a small office. Nobody needed a headset in there. He wore it anyway.
"Gordon! Team Northgate!" he said. "I am so pumped. This is going to be pure, uncut synergy."
On mute, Ingrid clucked. Nobody on the call heard it. But everybody in the room did.
Trent talked for fourteen minutes. I have performed with ventriloquists who paused more often. He talked about vision, scale, and "unlocking value at the intersection of people and platforms."
Ingrid sat at the head of the table with her calculator. Every time she clucked, she pressed a button.
At first I thought it was a nervous habit. Then I leaned over her shoulder.
She was counting.
When Trent finally said, "Let's crush it tomorrow," and the screen went dark, the calculator read 23.
Ingrid stared at it for a long time. Then she pulled the Apexion file out from under the ceramic hen. She flipped to the financials and ran her finger down a column. Then she ran it down again.
"Gordon," she said. "In fourteen minutes, how many numbers did he give us?"
Gordon thought about it. "He said 'ten-x' a few times."
"That's not a number. That's a feeling." Ingrid tapped the calculator.
"He said the word twenty-three times. He gave us zero revenue figures, zero margins, and zero client names."
Gordon opened his mouth, then closed it again.
"I've been hearing that word in meetings for nineteen years," Ingrid said slowly. "Now I can't miss it."
She looked down at the ceramic hen. "And they use it exactly when they have nothing to show you."
I found her in her office at six that evening, when the floor was mostly empty. My snap was the best it had been in fifteen years. It made a sound like a small dry twig breaking. I had a plan, a quiet room, and a full thermos of tea.
"I think I can do it tonight," I said. "If you can relax at all. Even a little. It's your call, as always."
Ingrid was sitting at her desk with the Apexion file open. The ceramic hen watched me from its pile of paper.
"Not tonight," she said.
"Ingrid—"
"I mean it. I'm asking you not to." She took off her reading glasses.
"It's harmless, Leonard. You said so yourself. Nobody is hurt by a cluck."
It was the first time she had called me Leonard.
"You're sure?" I asked. "This is your choice, not mine or Gordon's. If you want it gone, I'll stay here all night."
"I'm sure. Leave it in until Friday at noon. Then you can take it out, and I'll lie on any couch you like."
She slid the calculator across the desk toward me. It still read 23.
"Tomorrow, Trent Whitlow is going to stand in our boardroom and ask us for forty million dollars," she said. "I want to hear exactly how many times he says it."
Up next: Due Diligence
Continue to Part 5 →