“You Manhattan types always do your homework,” she teased, flipping through some things on her phone while we talked.
“I’m a Denver boy from way back,” I corrected. “But let me ask you something. Your firm is doing outreach to community groups, collaborating with neighborhood business associations, that kind of thing?”
“That’s right,” she answered, snatching a small puff pastry from the tray with her napkin and then placing it carefully on her plate. “Why do you ask?”
“I was doing a site visit recently, and a local business owner was surprised to hear of our plans.” I took a sip of my coffee, tasting the bitter liquid in the back of my throat. “I was taken aback that he hadn’t heard word yet.”
“What site?” she asked, perking slightly to attention.
“In the Baker neighborhood,” I replied. “Part of the new bus network.”
Patricia frowned, then leaned a little closer to me. “That’s not totally shocking,” she said under her breath. “Have you met Alex yet? Across the table in the pale gray button-up?”
I nodded. I’d only chatted with him briefly, but as the head of a firm overseeing the environmental impact and sustainability of the project, he and I were going to be working together on occasion. He struck me as a regular green business type, invested in his work but not overly ambitious.
“Well,” Patricia continued, “I shouldn’t go spreading gossip, but I’ve heard some rumors about the firm he represents. They have a national presence, and a lot of the head executives line their pockets with side projects that aren’t exactly aboveboard.” She nodded to a woman entering the room and lifted her pastry. “Alex was asking me about that location himself a couple of months ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s sticking his finger into the project for personal gain.”
I sighed. My fantasy of Denver being a relaxed place to do business for the year was really taking a beating. “Do you have any suggestions?” I asked as she nibbled the pastry.
Patricia shook her head, swallowing. “I’ll have my team see what happened on the communications end and make sure we reestablish contact. Otherwise, just keep your eye on that one,” she said, nodding slightly toward Alex.
“Thanks for the tip,” I said as the meeting began. “I’ll get you a martini sometime to say thanks.”
“Gin, not vodka,” she whispered back.
The meeting was called by the city’s budgetary office, which meant a few particularly stiff men in especially drab suits were in charge. I jumped in from the start, talking numbers and steering the conversation, always guiding it toward the result that I knew would make the most sense. Even with a nuts-and-bolts job like the one I had taken on, there was plenty of opportunity for power clashes and more than enough high-consequence decisions to keep my heart rate accelerated.
A woman representing the architecture firm cleared her throat across from me, interrupting the chief budgetary suit. “The contracts all say that neighborhoods get renovations that match their existing architectural styles,” she pointed out. “Our budget is large, but so is the project.”
“I haven’t heard anything about matching the neighborhood styles,” one executive objected. “That will affect our plans.”
Everyone started muttering at once, and I took another sip of my coffee. Meetings always had to fall apart at peak frustration before they got anywhere good.
“Actually,” I said loudly, straightening my back. “I ran into some questions regarding communications between the neighborhood associations and the higher-level planning myself.” I glanced at Patricia from the corner of my eye, almost feeling bad about the implicit criticism of her work, especially after she had just thrown me a lead. “None of these have to be major problems, though. Just clear a little extra funding to run a task force out of the main office, working with Patricia’s team, and we’ll get it all sorted out again.”
The budgetary men all started shaking their heads, the very phrase “extra funds” seeming to send them into a tizzy. In private practice, decisions like that would have been mine to make, but working with the city government meant layers of bureaucratic rubber stamping. “There’s no way we can add that in—all the funds are already claimed.”
I pulled my folder out, flipping casually through the papers while we talked. “I was going to present this later, but I did some house cleaning after I arrived. The administrative office is running at twenty percent less cost. All I had to was redirect our services to existing internal collaborators under the umbrella of the development project.” I slid a few papers across the table and finally helped myself to one of the pastries. “A task force will only cost a portion of what I already saved, and as you’ll see, I’m relaunching our internal communications team anyway.”
The conversation moved on, and my heartbeat dropped back closer to normal. There was a thrill whenever I cashed in on the hard work I was doing, day by day. And although what I said to Grandpa about the work being the best part was true, I did get a bit of pleasure from the ego rush.
“Cutthroat,” Patricia said under her breath, leaning in close as another slide came up on the projector. “I know you must have knocked out a few employees to get those numbers down.”
“No one who was actually doing their job. At least I didn’t throw you under the bus. If anything, your job just got a little easier.”
“Can’t complain about that,” she replied, returning to her phone.
The rest of the meeting went by in a blur, and in no time, I was back to my office. Kicking my legs up on the desk, I rubbed my temples, thinking slowly through the list of things I wanted to get done. My back hurt from pounding the pavement all week, and I considered splurging and ordering myself a massage, but I really just wanted five minutes of a shoulder rub while I was watching some braindead sitcom.
Letting out a puff of air, I turned to my computer instead. Some night soon, I was going to need a reward. But until then, I’d moved across the country to work, and there was no shortage of it to do.
