Page 68 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

He was in the truck before Maris woke. He left her a note on the counter next to an insulated mug with her coffee. Site visit. Back by noon. —G

He climbed out of the truck at the top of what would have been the main entrance to Riverstone Meadows. It didn’t look like much. Cracked asphalt with weeds growing through the cracks and a subdivision sign bleached blank by the weather. But the roads were still there, weed-cracked but graded and holding. He pried off the cover of a manhole and found the storm line dry and intact below. Utility spurs were stubbed up at the lot lines, capped and waiting.

He put his hand to a cut bank where the road sliced through the hillside, and let the stone talk to him. Water and stone had been arguing since before there was anybody to bet on the outcome. The water here went down, cleanly and obediently, into the bedrock. Not sideways through a fault into a seep some rare lily had spent ten thousand years learning to drink from. This slope wanted to be built on. The ridge did not.

He stood up and wiped the grit off his palm. Then he did what he’d come to do. He ran the numbers in his head, standing in the ruins of another man’s ambition, and found an answer. By noon he was back home. By one he had a proposal. By three he had the executive team on a video call, and by three oh five he understood that he was going to have a fight on his hands.

“Let me make sure I have this right,” his CFO said calmly. Laura Ventura was a human with short blonde hair and the calm expression of a female who had already found the flaw in his plan. “You want to advise Palisade—our biggest prospect in two years—not to close on the Hollow Ridge parcel?”

“Yes.”

“A parcel which we don’t own. A parcel which Ruggiero is under contract to buy, not us.”

“Correct.”

“So we are not withdrawing from our property. We are telling a client to walk away from theirs, and buy a different one instead. Riverstone. Which we also don’t own.”

“Which is available at a distressed price,” he said, “with roads, storm infrastructure and utility stubs already in the ground. It can be bought at a discount because the last builder went under owing the bank more than the land is worth.”

Laura didn’t say anything but he knew she was analyzing his proposal. Her ability to analyze a problem was one of the reasons he paid her the extraordinary amount he paid her.

Fernando Dell, the gnome head of development, was less patient. “Garrick, with respect, Ruggiero fell in love with the ridge. The views. The exclusivity. That’s the pitch that got Palisade to the table—top of the world, nothing above you. Riverstone is a nice slope with a nice view of some other slopes. It is not top of the world. His own people looked at it in the spring and passed.”

“They looked at the asking price and the acreage. Nobody priced the infrastructure that’s already on it.” He brought the plan up on the screen. “Riverstone holds the same unit count at a lower cost basis with no environmental fight. Ruggiero doesn’t want the ridge. He wants a return.”

“He wants the ridge.”

“He wants a return more,” he said evenly, “and I can get him a better one somewhere that won’t put us in front of a regulator for the next two years defending a grading plan I don’t believe in.”

“You bid the ridge,” Fernando said. “You bid it a month ago. We spent real money on that bid.”

He’d expected that one, but he winced anyway. “I know.”

“So what changed?”

A female. A boy. A lily the size of my thumb. My hand on a rock that told me a truth I didn’t want to hear. None of that would translate to something Fernando would understand, so he said the only part of it that would.

“I looked at the site properly.”

Laura cut back in, her voice quiet. “Garrick, your reasons are your business. I’m concerned about the firm’s business. If you talk Ruggiero off the ridge, and the Riverstone numbers don’t hold, we haven’t just lost the ridge contract. We’ve talked our biggest prospect out of a deal he wanted, into one that didn’t work, and Palisade never calls us again. We lose the job and the client in one move.”

“I understand the exposure.”

“I don’t think you do. Because you’ve been quoting a loss number on the ridge bid that I don’t believe is real.”

He frowned at her.

“Two hundred thousand,” Laura said. “That’s what you’ve been thinking, isn’t it? How much it will cost if we walk.”

She was right. He’d let the number stand because he’d already made the decision, and he wasn’t going to pretend that it wasn’t a costly one. He pulled the ridge file towards him and did what he should have done before. He ran the numbers properly.

“The building designs move,” he said slowly, reading it off as he went through them. “The architectural package with the unit mix and the elevations. The construction docs were drawn for a slope, and Riverstone is a slope. They transfer. The marketing, the branding, the pro forma structure. They transfer.” He moved down the column. “The only things we lose are the geotech report, the boundary survey, and the grading plan. Those are site-specific and non-transferable.”

He read the number at the bottom of those three lines.

“That’s not a two hundred,” he said. “That’s seventy.”

“So the loss you’ve been mourning is a third of what you told everyone. Including, I suspect, yourself,” Laura said dryly.