The first time Margot saw Declan lose a deal, it was almost a relief.
Not because she wanted him to fail.
Because she needed proof that the world wouldn’t end if he did.
It happened three weeks after the Flushing dinner, on a gray Monday that already felt like a hangover.
They were in a video pitch with a European energy conglomerate—Helvion—who’d been flirting with Hale’s optimization platform for months.
“We like what you’re doing with NexTelis,” the Helvion CFO said in a smooth Swiss accent. “But we’re concerned about… concentration. We’d prefer not to tie ourselves to one vendor for all our infrastructure needs.”
“I understand,” Declan said, posture loose, voice even. “That’s wise. We don’t want you dependent on us either. That’s why we structure our contracts as partnerships, not monopolies.”
The CFO smiled, polite but immovable. “Still. We’ve decided to go with Cassio instead. Diversification. You know how it is.”
Cassio.
Their biggest rival in Europe.
A younger Declan might have argued. Pushed. Tried to claw back ground with last-minute concessions.
This one didn’t.
“Congratulations,” he said instead. “They’re good. If it doesn’t work out, we’ll still be here.”
“That’s very gracious,” the CFO said, clearly surprised.
He shrugged. “It’s honest.”
They exchanged a few more pleasantries.
The call ended.
The screen blinked to the home menu.
Silence.
Margot sat in the chair by the window, notebook open, pen still.
He stared at the blank screen.
For a heartbeat too long, she thought he might throw his laptop.
Instead, he closed it gently.
“Well,” he said. “That sucked.”
“You didn’t want to discount?” she asked carefully.
“I did,” he said. “Hard. I wanted to offer them a free pilot, equity upside, my firstborn child. But the numbers didn’t justify it, and—” He made a face. “And Kline’s voice in my head said, ‘What are you trying to prove?’”
She smiled faintly. “Progress.”
“I hate progress,” he muttered. “It feels like losing.”
She watched him.
The tightness in his jaw.
The way his hands had balled into fists, then purposefully relaxed.
“You okay?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s… frustrating. But not… catastrophic.”
She exhaled. “That’s… good.”
He shot her a look. “You like seeing me lose?”
“No,” she said. “I like seeing you not… implode when you do.”
His mouth twitched.
He sank back in his chair.
“You know what my father would say,” he said.
“Something nurturing and understanding, I’m sure,” she deadpanned.
“‘Only losers get used to losing,’” he said, voice dropping into a deeper mimicry. “‘If you don’t win, someone else will. And then they own you.’”
She grimaced. “Charming.”
“He believed it,” Declan said. “Still does.”
“What do *you* believe?” she asked.
He thought.
“Sometimes you lose,” he said slowly. “You learn. You move. If you let one loss define you, you’re… brittle. I don’t want to be brittle.”
“You’re not,” she said.
“Sometimes I am,” he said. “With you.”
Her heart stuttered.
“Color?” she asked, because it was safer.
“Yellow,” he said. “Maybe orange. You?”
“Greenish,” she said. “For once. This is… not my crisis.”
He huffed. “You’re allowed to own a crisis.”
“I prefer renting,” she said.
He smiled.
The Helvion loss, on paper, wasn’t huge.
Annoying. But not fatal.
What made it a stress test was what followed.
Within forty-eight hours, three things hit at once:
1. A minor but noisy activist investor bought a chunk of Hale stock and started tweeting about “mission creep” and “woke capitalism.” 2. A NexTelis plant in Texas had a safety incident—no deaths, thank God, but enough of an explosion to make the evening news. 3. An internal Hale engineering team leaked a draft of the remediation policy to a union-friendly blog, framing it as “too little, too late.”
The building vibrated with tension.
“This is when all our pretty words get pressure-tested,” Eliza said grimly in the war room, pointing at the three items on the wall.
“Investors,” Victor added sourly. “Regulators. Employees. Pick your poison.”
“We don’t pick,” Declan said. “We handle all three.”
He looked at Margot.
“Layer me,” he said.
She was already on it.
“First: activist,” she said, tapping the name on the screen. “He’s more bark than bite. Likes attention. We give him a fifteen-minute call, let him feel important, and feed him just enough about long-term returns to keep him from organizing others.”
Victor snorted. “You can’t charm everyone with blog posts and sad grandpa stories.”
“No,” she said. “But you can buy time.”
“Second,” she went on, “the plant. Internal comms first. Before CNN. We get in front of it. Facts only. No spin. Simultaneously, we coordinate with Safety and Ops to make sure whatever went wrong is not going to happen again in the next twenty-four hours.”
“Ambitious,” Gita murmured.
“Necessary,” Margot said.
“And third,” she said, “the leak. We don’t chase it. The doc wasn’t finalized. We own it. ‘Yes, we’re working on remediation. No, it’s not enough yet. Yes, we’re listening.’ If we treat it like a state secret, we look guilty.”
She felt his eyes on her.
Approval.
Trust.
Weight.
“This is going to be… ugly,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “But we knew that.”
He rolled his shoulders.
“Let’s get ugly, then,” he muttered.
***
The activist investor—one Kyle Barrett—was every cliché Margot had ever disliked.
Mid-thirties. Too-white teeth. Podcast. A self-satisfied air that suggested he believed he’d invented capitalism.
He dialed in from what looked like a WeWork, a neon *HUSTLE* sign glowing faintly behind him.
“Declan,” he said, grinning. “Big fan. Big admirer. Big position.”
“Mr. Barrett,” Declan said evenly. “To what do I owe the… pleasure.”
Margot sat offscreen, out of camera view, but well within scribble range.
“I’ve been following your NexTelis play,” Barrett said. “Bold. Risky. Expensive.”
“Yes,” Declan said. “All three.”
“And I love your… story,” Barrett went on. “Grandfather. Store. Evil big box. Very compelling. Very… on trend. Stakeholder capitalism, all that.”
Margot’s hand tightened on her pen.
“But,” Barrett said, leaning forward conspiratorially, “I’m concerned you’re… losing the plot. All this talk about ‘remediation’ and ‘ethical commitments’… it’s nice for the *Times* op-ed page, but my LPs care about returns.”
There it was.
“I understand,” Declan said. “You should. That’s your job.”
“And yours,” Barrett said pointedly. “Fiduciary duty and all that.”
“Yes,” Declan said again. “To maximize long-term shareholder value.”
“Long-term,” Barrett repeated. “Key word.”
“Yes,” Declan said. “Short-term games are boring.”
Barrett chuckled. “Spoken like a man who is very sure of himself.”
Declan’s mouth twitched.
“Here’s the thing,” Barrett went on. “I look at what you’re doing with NexTelis—paying off old debts, inviting former suppliers to ‘consult,’ cutting your EPS for optics—and I see… virtue signaling. Woke mission creep. A distraction from your core product.”
Margot wrote in her notebook: *He wants a quote he can clip. Don’t give it to him.*
Declan’s gaze flicked briefly downward, catching the movement.
“What you’re seeing,” he said slowly, “is risk mitigation.”
Barrett laughed. “Come on. Don’t spin me. You think because you’re honest about it, I won’t clock the politics?”
“It’s not politics,” Declan said. “It’s math.”
Margot’s pen paused.
“Walk me through it,” Barrett said, amused.
“Okay,” Declan said. “Let’s start with lawsuits. NexTelis had X outstanding cases when we acquired them. Settlements, legal fees, brand damage. We can either wait for more to crop up—reactive, expensive—or we can proactively address the biggest sources of harm. That costs upfront. It saves later.”
“Maybe,” Barrett said. “If you believe in soft factors.”
“I believe in… probabilities,” Declan said. “Also in regulators. Also in employees who don’t want to work for the next NexTelis. If we treat this like a pure extraction, we’ll get extracted. Eventually.”
Barrett tilted his head. “So you’re saying… what? That this… ‘ethical’ stuff is just long-term value creation?”
“Yes,” Declan said. “And also that it’s… the right thing to do. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“I love when the right thing lines up with the profitable thing,” Barrett said dryly.
“So do I,” Declan said. “Makes my life easier. But when they don’t, I have to make a call. That’s leadership. If you want someone who’ll always choose the short-term pop, you should invest in someone else.”
The air pulsed.
Margot held her breath.
Barrett studied him.
Then laughed.
“You’re fun,” he said. “Annoying as hell. But fun.”
“Thank you,” Declan said.
“Look,” Barrett went on. “I’ll keep my position for now. See how this shakes out. You fuck it up, I’ll be loud. You pull it off, I’ll be louder. Deal?”
“Deal,” Declan said.
They hung up.
He leaned back.
Margot exhaled.
“You liked that,” she accused.
“A little,” he admitted. “He’s… a useful idiot.”
“Useful how,” she asked.
“He tells me where the greedy end of the spectrum is,” he said. “So I can see how far I’m drifting.”
She smiled, grudgingly impressed.
“You sounded… sure,” she said. “When you told him you’d choose long-term over short.”
“I sounded,” he said. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t… flinch.”
“You didn’t,” she said. “That matters.”
He looked at her.
“Yes,” he said. “It does.”
***
The Texas plant mess was less satisfying.
A minor explosion in a cooling unit.
Two workers hospitalized with burns.
No fatalities.
Safety protocols had been… followed.
Mostly.
There were gaps.
An old NexTelis maintenance schedule that hadn’t caught a faulty valve.
An understaffed night shift.
A supervisor who’d flagged concerns months ago and been told, “We don’t have budget for that this quarter.”
“I hate that phrase,” Margot muttered in the war room as Gita walked them through the report. “It’s code for ‘we’re fine with rolling the dice on people’s lives.’”
“It’s standard,” Gita said bitterly. “Everywhere. Not just us. Not just NexTelis.”
“Doesn’t make it less shitty,” Margot said.
“Agreed,” Declan said. “So we stop using it.”
He wrote on the whiteboard: *No more “no budget” for safety.*
“Good luck telling Finance that,” Victor said.
“I’ll tell them,” Declan said. “Personally. Caleb can glare. I’ll live.”
Margot watched him.
“This is where we see,” she said, “if you mean what you said to my father. About… not becoming them.”
He caught her eye.
“I know,” he said.
Jess, in the back of the room, raised a hand.
“I know it’s… not my lane,” she said. “But maybe we stop having ‘safety’ as a separate budget line item that can be cut. Build it into baseline costs. Like… rent. Or salaries.”
Gita nodded. “Yes. If it’s optional, it’s the first thing to go under pressure.”
Eliza scribbled. “We can do that. It’ll piss off some plant managers who like to play games with numbers. But we can.”
Victor looked like he’d swallowed a lemon.
“This is going to clobber margins,” he said. “At least in the short term.”
Declan didn’t flinch.
“So did NexTelis’s settlements,” he said. “We’re just paying a different bill.”
Margot smiled.
“Growth,” she whispered.
He shot her a look.
“Don’t get used to it,” he muttered.
***
The leak—the blog post painting their remediation plan as “corporate guilt theatre”—stung.
Not because it was entirely wrong.
Because parts of it weren’t.
“Look at this,” Nina said, pulling it up on the big screen.
Anonymous, of course.
Self-styled as a “worker collective voice.”
> Hale’s ‘Supplier Remediation Task Force’ sounds great on paper. Former partners consulted, fancy ethicists brought in, promises of ‘doing better.’ > > > We’re not saying it’s meaningless. Some people will get help. That matters. > > > But let’s not forget: Hale only started caring when they bought a PR dumpster fire. They’re still a corporation whose core function is making money. They will always prioritize that. No amount of ‘listening sessions’ changes the power dynamic.
“That’s… fair,” Priya said with a shrug when someone forwarded it to her.
“I hate that it’s fair,” Margot said.
Dr. Alvarez, on Zoom, nodded. “The point isn’t to argue with them. It’s to acknowledge the limits of what you’re doing. You are still a corporation. You will still make trade-offs. Anyone who thinks otherwise is selling something.”
Declan sat, fingers steepled.
“Do we respond?” he asked.
“No,” Margot said.
“Yes,” Marissa said at the same time.
They looked at each other.
Marissa held up a hand. “Not with a statement. With actions. Invite them to a forum. Give them access to your data. Show them what you’re willing to show regulators. Let them see you’re not just writing checks for the cameras.”
“That’s… risky,” Nina said.
“So is not,” Marissa said. “They’ll keep filling in blanks with suspicion. You can either resent that or… engage.”
Margot weighed it.
“Maybe not *them*,” she said. “Anonymous blogs are a hydra. But we can create a public log of cases. Redacted. Aggregated. Show patterns. Show where we said no. That’s… scary.”
Dr. Alvarez smiled. “That’s accountability.”
Declan looked at Margot.
“You willing to publish your… homework?” he asked.
She took a breath.
“Yes,” she said. “Fuck it.”
He laughed.
Nina groaned. “My HR heart is shriveling.”
“You can have my legal budget for therapy,” Eliza muttered.
They did it.
Not all at once.
Not perfectly.
But a month later, there was a page on Hale’s website titled *Legacy Partner Remediation – Quarterly Report*.
It showed numbers.
Categories.
Not names.
Not gory details.
But enough.
Enough for small business forums to pick it up and say, “Huh. This is… new.”
Enough for the anonymous blog to grudgingly update their post with, *To their credit, Hale is actually sharing more than most. Stay tuned.*
Margot took that as a win.
A weird, internet-era win.
She sent the link to her father.
He replied the next day.
> *I read. You made them show their homework. Good. I like your math better than theirs.*
She smiled.
Forwarded it to Declan.
He replied with a single emoji—the first she’d ever seen from him.
👏
She laughed out loud in the war room.
Jess glanced over. “Good news?”
“Decent,” Margot said. “My father likes our math.”
Jess raised her brows. “High bar.”
“Very,” Margot said.
***
One night, late, as they stood by the window, looking out at the river, Declan said, “I’m not sure I know who I am without a crisis.”
She glanced at him. “You just getting that now?”
He made a face.
“I’m serious,” he said. “We’ve been in… sprint mode for months. Years, really. Build. Scale. Close. Fight. I don’t know what… stillness looks like.”
“You’re not going to get stillness anytime soon,” she said. “Integration alone will be two years of chaos.”
“Yes,” he said. “But this… edge. The feeling that if I let go for five minutes, everything will fall apart… that’s not sustainable.”
“And yet you lived in it for a decade,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “And I built a machine that expects me to keep doing it.”
She considered.
“Maybe,” she said slowly, “the point isn’t to *stop* being on the edge. It’s to… widen it. Make it less like a knife and more like… a ledge.”
He blinked. “That’s… vague.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Layman’s therapy.”
He huffed.
“What does that look like?” he asked. “Practically.”
“Not making yourself the single point of failure,” she said. “Which you’re… bad at.”
“Historically,” he said. “Less so now. With you.”
“That’s… not healthy,” she said. “You can’t swap one single point of failure for another. That’s just… transfer.”
He grimaced. “True.”
She turned to face him fully.
“Build redundancies,” she said. “For you. For me. For this company. If I get hit by a bus—”
“Don’t,” he muttered.
“—or if you decide you want a normal life,” she went on, ignoring him, “Hale should still stand. Maybe wobble. But stand.”
He studied her.
“You think about leaving,” he said.
“Sometimes,” she said honestly. “Usually when you’re being… extra.”
He snorted.
“And you?” she asked. “You ever think about… stopping?”
He hesitated.
“Yes,” he said quietly.
She blinked. “Really?”
“When it’s two in the morning and I realize I haven’t talked to my sister in months,” he said. “When I see an email from Kline and think, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ Not just therapy. All of it.”
Her chest tightened.
“What stops you?” she asked.
He looked at her.
“You,” he said simply.
Her breath caught.
“Declan,” she whispered.
“Not just you,” he amended. “You and… this. The work. The possibilities. The… maybe.”
He didn’t elaborate.
He didn’t need to.
She swallowed.
“Color?” she asked softly.
“Green,” he said.
She smiled.
“Then we’re okay,” she said. “For now.”
He nodded.
They stood there.
Side by side.
Looking out at the city that never slept.
Maybe they wouldn’t either.
But they were, at least, learning to rest in motion.
It wasn’t balance.
It was something like fault tolerance.
And for two people who’d built their lives on the edges of other people’s worlds, that felt like the closest thing to safety they knew.