Page 1 of Working for Keeps

One

Vera

The sign welcoming me to Forge Creek is exactly as rusted as I remember. The green paint peeling at the edges like burnt paper, revealing the oxidized iron beneath the surface.

Forge Creek, Colorado. Population: 14,200.

Underneath the population count, someone has spray-painted a rough line, a minor act of small-town rebellion not scrubbed away in the three years I’ve been gone.

I grip the steering wheel of my rental car until my knuckles go white. The car smells like industrial cleaner and stale air freshener: a sterile scent that turns suffocating the moment I roll down the window.

The air rushes in cold enough to take the top off my lungs, laced with industrial oil and fresh-cut lumber and metal grit. It smells like hard work, like the kind of tired that lives in your shoulders.

It smells like Mick.

I swallow hard against the tightness in my throat as I wind down the pothole-riddled two-lane into the valley.

For three years, I’ve told myself that leaving was the right call. In the glass-and-steel canyons of Chicago, surrounded by spreadsheets, performance metrics, and the relentless hum of the corporate climb, I found rewriting history easy. I’d convinced myself that the Dear John letter I left on Mick’s kitchen table was an act of mercy.

We were young, trapped in a dying town, suffocating under a weight of expectations we couldn’t carry. I wanted a career; he wanted a life anchored to the soil and steel of his ancestors.

I saved us both, I’ve muttered on lonely nights in my high-rise apartment, watching city traffic crawl below. I gave him his freedom, and I took mine.

What I don’t let myself think about is that I didn’t only leave Mick. I left the one place that ever held all my pieces in the same room. My father carried me into this valley when I was four, a quiet Navy man home from Subic Bay with a half-Filipina daughter on his hip.

My mother got eleven Colorado winters before the cancer took her, my father a few years past that, and what was left was Nana Warden, the house she’d lived in for fifty years, and the two of us, my sister and me, raised on grief, casseroles, and an iron refusal to turn out soft.

I was the older one. I learned early that you earn your place by not needing one. I’ve been perfecting it ever since.

But as the skyline of Forge Creek comes into view, the lie crumbles. The files on my laptop may have given me the data saying Forge Creek was dying, but the valley coming at me through the windshield is a different number entirely.

I slow the sedan as the road constricts into a corridor of bright orange construction barrels. To my left, the century-old brick skeleton of the old textile mill crawls with workers; half its facade has been sandblasted to a rich crimson, and a hand-painted sign for an artisan copper-works forge hangs over the archway.

I drive over the Black River Bridge, tires rumbling over a freshly laid seam of black asphalt. A yellow Public Works truck is parked at the berm as a crew in reflective vests reinforces the iron railings.

Well, whatever state Forge Creek is in, I tell myself I’m here to help it along.

I pull into the gravel lot of Halvorsen Works and park in a visitor space surrounded by mud-splattered four-wheel-drive pickups with toolboxes bolted to the beds. My silver rental is ridiculous here, and I can see that from inside it.

I sit longer than I mean to, staring at the weather-beaten brick facade of the plant. Halvorsen Works has been the anchor of this valley for seventy years. My father worked here. So did his father before him. The plant makes heavy-duty industrial valves and custom steel stampings, unglamorous, essential components that keep the country running.

But Chicago Corporate doesn’t care about heritage. It cares about margins, and it cares that Halvorsen’s labor costs are dragging down quarterly projections, so it sent me down here as the corporate restructuring representative, which is a bloodless title designed to hide the ugly truth.

I’m the hatchet woman. I’m here to optimize, to streamline, to cut the fat.

And the fat, in corporate terms, always means people.

I never expected it to come to this. I’ve worked at Vantor Industries for nine years, six of them right here in town back when they had a remote office. When they offered me the Chicago office three years ago, impressed by my work ethic, I said yes before the man finished the sentence and left Forge Creek without looking back.

Only now I’m back.

My reflection in the rearview mirror is pure corporate, as if I’d walked out of a company brochure. Dark hair pinned into a sleek bun, makeup flawless. And then there’s my battle gear: charcoal blazer, white silk blouse, slim trousers.

Only here, it makes me look like an executioner who bought her outfit on Michigan Avenue.

I can do this, I tell myself. It’s just an audit. I present the metrics and then I leave.

The admin office is what I expected. Low ceilings, fluorescent buzz, linoleum worn thin in the lanes between the desks. The receptionist doesn’t look up when the bell chimes.