Page 6 of The Law of Attraction
“Are they looking at you or are they looking at me?” Olivia asked.
“You, I think. Did you fuck something up?”
“Not that I know of.” Not since that fiasco with the Tulelake plant, anyway. Christ on a tricycle, could that be what this was about? The one thing she’d fucked up in her four years at the company. And it wasn’t even her fault. The head of the west desk was the one who’d insisted on the three-by-eight generator configuration.
Olivia had tried to talk him out of it, knowing that configuration wouldn’t work with that plant, but he’d waved her concerns away. What was she supposed to do? Refuse to follow a directive from the head trader? Of course, then his way had backfired, just like she’d known it would, and the company had been fined by CAISO. But because he was a trader who made the company millions of dollars, culpability had magically bounced right off him and onto her.
“Okay, they’re not looking anymore,” Trevor said.
Olivia exhaled. “What are they doing?”
“Gavin’s talking to Brad and Cortinas now.”
“Okay.” Hopefully the danger had passed. Maybe it was just a coincidence that they’d all been looking this direction. Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with her.
“Oh my god, my high school buddy posted this hilarious video on Facebook this morning,” Trevor said, and Olivia girded herself. “There’s this little kid, and she’s trying to get Alexa to play that baby shark song. You know the one, it goes like—”
Olivia’s phone vibrated loudly on the desk next to her. A feeling of cold dread sank into her bones as she read the notification. It was a text from Gavin:
Come join us in the conference room.
What in the pluperfect hell was going on? Had Adam said something about her?
Trevor peered over her shoulder. “Guess they were definitely looking at you, then.”
She pushed herself to her feet. “We who are about to die salute you.”
“I’ll pray for you.”
“Thanks.” When she turned toward the conference room, all three of its occupants were staring at her again, and none of them looked happy. Even Adam looked like he’d swallowed a wasp.
Olivia wended her way through the maze of cubicles and pulled the conference room door open. Maybe if she didn’t actually step across the threshold, she could remain uninvolved. Maybe they just needed to ask her a quick question. Something simple she could answer quickly and then go back to work.
“You rang?” She hovered just outside the door, pointedly refusing to look at Adam or acknowledge his presence.
“Come in.” Gavin waved her to the chair across from him. “Close the door.”
Fuck me sideways. Olivia mustered all her resources to paste a pleasant expression on her face as she obeyed.
Brad offered her a strained smile. “Thanks for joining us. Gavin, you want to bring her up to speed?”
She’d only had occasion to speak to the CIO a handful of times before, and he always put her on edge. There was a briskness beneath the surface of his politeness, like he wouldn’t hesitate to cut you loose as soon as you stopped being useful to him.
“Sure.” Gavin shifted in his seat and ran a hand through his thinning brown hair. He was only in his mid-thirties, but with his pleated pants and unfashionable haircut, he looked more middle-aged than Brad, despite being almost twenty years his junior. “We’ve finally inked the deal on our acquisition of the Walhalla plant in Texas,” he told Olivia.
“Great.” It had been in the works for months, but these things had a tendency to move slowly.
“The original plan was to have the plant onboarded within thirty days,” Gavin said, shifting his eyes to Brad.
It was an aggressive timeline, but not impossible for a smaller acquisition. Olivia nodded, confused why everyone seemed so worked up about it.
Brad’s smile became even more strained. “Unfortunately, it’s taken three weeks to do our due diligence and get the deal cleared by the regulators. But in the meantime…” He winced like he’d stepped on a Lego. “A commitment was made to the board of directors to have the plant fully integrated with our systems and operating as part of our fleet by the end of June.”
The end of June was only a few days away. There was no way they would be able to make it.
Olivia couldn’t help noticing Brad’s use of the passive voice, which implied the commitment had somehow made itself, magically. It certainly wasn’t because he had made an unrealistic commitment to the board of his own free will.
“Which only leaves our teams a week to do our thing,” Gavin added with a grimace.
