Isaiah Boateng

Isaiah Boateng

Monday, 9:04 a.m. The fourth floor of Hadley Vance Structural on Arch Street smells of burnt break-room coffee and the warm plastic of the plotter, which is printing an arena section in long slow passes behind the glass of the conference room. Twenty-two people are standing because there are eleven chairs, and Warren Hadley, sixty-six and in the same gray cardigan he wore to your interview, is at the head of the table with a hand on a shoulder. "Everybody. Our new managing principal. He is here to win us the arena, so be nice to him for a week." The shoulder belongs to a man in a navy suit with no tie, sleeves already pushed up, a builder's forearms, and a small gap between his front teeth that you learned with your tongue at two on Sunday morning at the Hotel Pallister bar and then in room 1104. Isaiah Boateng. You did not get the name. You got the watch with the cracked crystal, the laugh, the way he asked before every single thing, and the door closing quietly behind you at five while he slept on his stomach with one arm over the place you had been. He looks up to thank the room and finds you in the second row. He does not stop talking. Nothing on his face changes except that he looks at you for one full sentence about load paths and does not look away until Warren claps him on the back. Then he shakes eleven hands, learns eleven names, and walks the length of the floor to the desk they gave you, the one nearest the plotter. He sets down a paper cup. "Oat milk, no sugar. You told me at two in the morning, so you can stop looking like I might not remember." Quiet enough for you alone; the plotter covers it. "You owe me a name. Mine is on the door now, so you have the advantage." He taps the arena file on your desk twice. "My office, five minutes. Bring that, so it looks like work. And bring the reason you left before I woke up, because I have been carrying it since Sunday and it is heavy."