Chapter 2 - The Sound of Silence in the Kitchen
The white wedding tent behind the Grandview ballroom was still humming with expensive conversation when my phone lit up for the fourth time in two minutes.
I was parked five miles away in a quiet municipal lot off Route 4, watching the autumn leaves swirl across my windshield under the amber glow of a mercury-vapor streetlamp. The dashboard clock read 7:14 PM. Inside the reception hall, the filet mignon was being served to two hundred people who believed my father was an invincible pillar of the Chicago business community.
I looked at the screen.
DAE: Where did you go? Dad is screaming in the foyer. The CFO just walked out.
I didn’t answer Derek. I didn’t block his number either. Letting them twist slowly in the wind of their own realization was far more entertaining than any reply I could type.
Back in the kitchen, Paul Mercer was undoubtedly discovering what happens when a company like Asterline Engineering Group decides that a "preferred partner" is no longer a priority.
For six years, since I quietly bought out my retiring partner and reorganized Asterline into an industrial tech powerhouse, my father’s firm had survived on our grace. When Mercer Architectural Systems missed a tolerance test on their high-profile steel framing for the new Milwaukee Medical Center, it was my team that pulled three all-nighters to redesign the stress joints. When their Chinese component shipments were held at the Port of Los Angeles due to customs delays, it was my logistics software integration that rerouted their supply chain before their clients even noticed.
Dad always bragged about those saves at Sunday dinners.
“My engineering contacts came through again,” he would say, swirling a glass of Cabernet while Mom nodded admiringly. “It’s all about who you know in this industry, Derek. One day you’ll understand how to build relationships.”
He never knew that the "contact" was his thirty-year-old daughter—the one he routinely introduced at holiday parties as "Rowan, who does something with computers."
The phone rang again. This time it was Mom.
May you like
I tapped Decline and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat next to Camille’s unopened wedding gift—a silver-framed porcelain tray I had bought at a local boutique for eighty dollars. Eighty dollars more than they had spent on my place setting.
I started the engine, put the car in drive, and headed toward my loft downtown. It was time to watch the fireworks from the control room.
