Chapter 3

Olivia's POV

I arrived in the Midwest late that night, checked into a motel, and slept. At ten the next morning I was sitting across from Wayne Holt — reading glasses, twenty years in grain distribution, the kind of man who prices a shipment the way a doctor reads a chart — and I pushed the purchase list across the table to him.

He adjusted his glasses and went down the list line by line: wheat, corn, oats, flour by grade, a full seed catalogue covering every major crop variety. He looked up. "If you don't mind my asking — an order this size, what's it for?"

I lifted a hand to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear and claimed, untruthfully, that I was funding an overseas emergency reserve program through a charitable foundation.

My manner was unhurried and easy: an heir of an old family, settling a vast logistics order as casually as booking a table at a restaurant. Wayne's expression shifted slightly, something complicated hidden beneath the courtesy.

I walked him through the delivery breakdown for the full order, several hundred thousand tons in total — and then said I expected to discuss pricing in proportion to the volume I was bringing him.

He leaned back in his chair. The market had been trending up, he said. Operating costs had increased.

I tapped the table once with two fingers. "Have you actually looked at the quantities?"

I kept my voice level. "Every category combined, several hundred thousand tons, in writing, right in front of you. And you're telling me there's no room to negotiate?"

I told him plainly that what I disliked most was a supplier who saw a buyer with resources and decided that was an invitation to inflate the price.

A short pause, and then I continued. I needed a partner who could handle an order of this scale — most buyers would never bring volume anywhere near this. If Wayne couldn't offer a reasonable price, the contract would go to someone else. There were enough large distributors willing to compete for it; comparing options was not difficult.

I let that sit for a moment. "Clients like me are not common, Mr. Holt. I'd suggest you think carefully and come back to me with a number that makes sense."

Wayne Holt read the impatience in my face, turned it over for a moment, and gave me a figure.

It was not a surprise. I did not let any trace of satisfaction show, because men in his line read faces the way accountants read ledgers, and the only expression I intended to give him was a thin, patient, faintly bored one.

I drew the folder from my bag and pushed it across the tablecloth. "Quantities first. Price after."

He looked over the list again, his eyes running down the figures.

A hundred thousand tons of wheat, a hundred thousand tons of corn, a hundred thousand tons of soybeans, a hundred thousand tons of oats, a hundred thousand tons of flour, dehydrated legumes, powdered milk, coffee, sugar, and at the end of the list the seed categories. By the third page his fingers had begun to tremble.

He was calculating the total in his head, but the numbers would not obey him.

The final total came out somewhere in the range of 1.5 billion dollars. It squeezed his profit almost to nothing, but still left him enough to keep operating for two years. No one would turn down a contract that size.

He gave a short, disbelieving laugh and reached for his cup, as though his hands needed something to hold.

At two in the afternoon we signed in his office — three copies, a notary brought in for the occasion, my lawyer relaying instructions word by word over speakerphone. When the ink was dry I proposed a walk through the storage yards to confirm the quality of the goods.

Wayne agreed immediately, with the particular eagerness of a man who has been asked to show off something he is proud of, and he drove me around the loop himself in a golf cart with a cracked windshield, narrating in the tone of a man introducing his own farm.

I photographed everything and let my face show nothing but satisfaction with what I saw.

What I was actually recording were three things: where the cameras pointed and where they did not, which warehouses stood far enough from the gate that no one in the office could see them, and which service roads ran out to the county highway without passing a single window.

By the time we finished the loop I had three locations fixed in my head — the far end of Building Seven, the dead wall behind the cold storage, and a north loading dock that had not been used in years.

On the way back he mentioned in passing that a consignment of frozen seafood had come in from the Midwest and was sitting nearby, waiting on a middleman. I asked which supplier. He answered without thinking about it.

At dusk I set out alone in a rented truck. Fifteen minutes down the road I found what I was looking for — a farm machinery repair shop with a lot wide enough to turn a semi around and the nearest highway camera half a mile off.

I got out, walked the perimeter, glanced up at the light, and saved the coordinates in my phone with one line beneath them: Point One.

The next two sites were just as easy: an abandoned grain elevator with a rusted scale still standing in the yard, and a co-op with a chain across the gate that nine seconds with a bolt cutter would handle. I marked them off one at a time.

That night I took a suite in a chain motel off the interstate, pulled the curtains shut, and spread the manifest across the bed.

I circled the three locations in red on a road atlas, wrote beside each one how many trucks it could absorb, and worked backward into a staggered transport schedule — one vehicle arrives, waits, departs; only then does the next one come. Halfway down the fourth page I put the pen down.

A hole had opened up in the plan. Thirty-odd truck runs, every one of them pulling out of the lot empty. Drivers talk.

A man hauls a full load six hours out and drives six hours back with nothing on the axles, and by the third trip he is asking anyone who will listen what exactly is going on.

I stared at the map for three silent seconds, then added a line to the notes: retain a third-party warehousing firm, lease two compliant warehouses as visible offload points, trucks unload against paperwork and leave, goods handled by me at night. The hole was patched.

I picked the red pen back up, and the corner of my mouth went up a little.

The lease was done in four days, written up as a disaster-relief supply transfer point.

Over the next two weeks, each shipment went into the rented warehouse and the door came down, and I stood among the rows of wheat sacks and bean sacks until the last sack was swallowed by that gray, then raised the door and went out to tell the driver the count was right.

In between, following the lead Wayne had given me, I found a seafood middleman and unloaded several hundred tons of salmon, lobster, and king crab off refrigerated trailers, at prices that were hard to believe.

The cooked food I bought separately, on my own — nobody plans to live on raw wheat for three years.

I went town to town around the warehouse corridor ordering takeout, never hitting the same place twice, three hundred portions minimum per order, fried chicken, burgers, or whole trays of lasagna, all on the foundation's card, with the same excuse every time: corporate team-building and community distribution.

Imagine, at the end of the world, biting into a chicken leg just pulled out of the oil — that would be happiness.

On the night of the fourteenth day, the last truckload of grain was unloaded. Wayne came in person to hand over the final settlement sheet, and brought along a box of local cheese and two bottles of cider. We shook hands under the parking lot lights, and he said to reach out anytime if I ever had similar needs. I nodded. That meant a source for the next two months.

I stood alone in the empty parking lot and looked up at the night sky.

The space now held hundreds of thousands of tons of grain, several hundred tons of frozen seafood, and several hundred thousand portions of cooked food collected from all over the Midwest within two weeks, and that warmth would stay frozen at the moment each was put in.

I twisted open the cider and took a sip.

"Rexie," I said to the empty air. "Give me a few more days."

Then I took out my phone and booked a flight to Texas.