And I made mine, too, even if I didn’t fully understand it then.
I chose to let him.
33
ELIANA
peel·ing: /'peliNG/: verb
1: the act of removing the outer layer of fruits or vegetables.
2: the act of removing clothes.
I spend the next two days buried in Frank’s damage assessment like a truffle pig looking for gold. Shockingly, I don’t find anything that glitters. It’s mostly just one issue after another.
Bastian is barely in the building. I assume he’s off bow-hunting endangered species or doing whatever else it is that billionaire culinary magnates do when they’re not making my life complicated, multi-orgasmic, or both. I do my best to keep my eyes on my own paper, so to speak. But my eyes keep drifting toward his empty office like I’m some deranged, lovesick idiot.
At a certain point, though, it’s like, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…
… then I guess I’m a deranged, lovesick duck.
It’s not like I don’t have enough to handle, though. Things are… well, “strange” might be the best way to put it.
The problem is that, the more I dig into Frank’s report, the less sense it makes. According to the documentation, we’ve got failures across multiple systems—HVAC, plumbing, electrical, fire suppression, on and on. It reads like someone took a sledgehammer and a blowtorch to the entire project.
But when I start making calls to verify the issues, I hit a wall of confusion.
“Ma’am, I don’t understand,” says the rep from Midwest Commercial HVAC on Wednesday afternoon. “We delivered those units on time and to spec. Your team signed off on the installation three weeks ago.”
“Right, but the failed inspection report says?—”
“Failed? What failed inspection report? We haven’t received any failure notices.”
I frown at my screen. “The one from February twentieth.”
He pauses and shuffles some papers around. “Ma’am, our records show the system passed inspection on February eighteenth. If there’s been a subsequent inspection issue, we weren’t notified.”
I thank him and hang up, then immediately call the fire suppression contractor.
Same story.
Then the plumbing subcontractor.
Same story again.
By Thursday afternoon, I’ve spoken to more than a dozen different vendors and subcontractors, and every single one of them swears their work was completed on time, to specification, and passed inspection. They’re as baffled as I am about Frank’s litany of catastrophic failures.
I lean back in my chair and stare at the ceiling tiles, trying to make the pieces fit.
Either Frank is lying about the scope of the problems, or someone else is lying to me about the state of their work. Or—and this is the possibility that continues to make my stomach clench every time I so much as evenbeginto consider it—someone is actively sabotaging Project Olympus.
But who? And why? And how?
I can feel a pixelated haze creeping in around the edges of my vision, equal parts leber congenital amaurosis and blue screen exhaustion. I need to touch grass, and maybe I can tackle two things at once if I take a field trip to Frank’s trailer to talk to him in person. Two functioning pairs of eyes on this disaster might be enough to crack the case.
Well, one and a half pairs, but whatever.
I shrug on my winter jacket and try not to giggle when I think about Bastian calling me a marshmallow. It’s hard to laugh once I get outside, anyway, because it’s cold as the dickens today and the wind is particularly vicious.
