Page 2

The mill finds me before I find it. I feel it in the soles of my boots a full block off, past the bridge, the low thrum of the Drapers running Friday's blue. My pulse falls in with it the way it has since I was seventeen and took a summer job in the barn store and never left.

The brick comes up out of the river mist, long and dark, with steam rising from the dye house vent like the building is breathing. The day shift is already filing in through the side door while the night shift drifts out, and everyone says my name in passing.

"Is it true?" I tell the last one, a man hauling his lunch pail, "Not yet," and the words taste like pennies.

Inside, it smells the way it always does, of lanolin and hot oil and wet wool, and I breathe it in as if I'm trying to memorize it. I climb the stairs.

There are forty-two of them, and I take them without rushing, and I'm only a little winded at the top, which I blame on the doughnut.

The conference room is glass along one side, looking down over the weaving floor, so the plaid goes by below us in a slow river of indigo and cream. Eleven department leads sit around the long table with their folders closed and their coffee untouched.

The woman from payroll stares at her own hands like they've done something. The man from the dye house has his stained fingers laced so tight the knuckles have gone white. Dolores stands against the back wall with her reading glasses on their chain and her arms crossed over her cardigan.

When I come in she gives me one look that says brace.

He's at the window with his back to me, and the first thing I notice is the coat.

Not a jacket. A charcoal overcoat, long and soft and plainly cashmere, folded over the chair beside him, as if even he realized what a mill does to cashmere.

He turns, and Mae was right, and I don't enjoy being told. He's tall, with dark hair he's already pushed back once and a jaw that has never been rained on. His tie is navy silk, knotted so precisely it looks like a statement.

He sees me and straightens. Nobody has stood when I walked into this room in the eleven years I've run this floor, and now I don't know where to put my hands.

"Ms. Brewer." He crosses to me with his hand already out. "Roman Caldwell."

His palm is warm and dry and large enough that my fingers disappear in it, indigo fingertips and all. I wait for him to glance at the stain the way people do, and he doesn't.

He looks at my hand like it's information. The shake lasts a beat longer than it should.

"Mae told me you'd be the one who argues," he says.

"Mae talks too much."

"Mae makes an extraordinary pie. I'd trust her with a mortgage."

"She also said you tip like a man who wants something."

The smile that crosses his face is slow and unbothered, the smile of someone who's been caught at it a thousand times and enjoyed every one. "Everyone wants something, Ms. Brewer. I'm only unusual in saying so." He gestures at the empty chair beside his. "Shall we sit?"

"I'll stand."

"Of course you will."

He walks to the head of the table, and I stay planted by the door. He doesn't use slides or notes. He lets his folder hang in one hand and talks to the room like it's full of old friends he's about to disappoint.

"Let me be clear about what this is," he says. "It is not a funeral. Ashgrove acquired this company in August. It is losing two hundred thousand dollars a month, and in a year and change it will be a very handsome brick building with nobody in it. I turn companies around. I have never lost one." He lets that sit. "The plan eliminates thirty-eight positions across the operation and returns this mill to profitability, which means a stronger company for the hundred and two people who stay. I'd rather you hear that from me, in this room, than in a letter."

Somebody's chair creaks. Down on the floor a shuttle cracks across, and cracks back. I realize I've stopped breathing, and so has the woman from payroll.

He sends the folders down the table, one for each department lead, each holding only that department's page.

Mine is the only complete copy, and I open it standing. I read the list the way you read a row of headstones. Page four, page five. On page six my thumb finds the line before my eyes do.

Pike, Dolores. Weaving, Senior. Role overlap. Redundant.

I can hear Dolores not breathing behind me.

"Excuse me," I say.