Chapter 1: Two Months Before

Evan had been at Mercer Industrial for exactly three weeks when his father called him into the office to talk about the future, which in Robert Mercer’s vocabulary meant one thing: Grant.

The three weeks before that call had gone by in a blur of learning where things were kept — which filing cabinet held the customer contracts and which held the vendor agreements, which extension belonged to which department, who to call when the fax machine jammed, which happened often enough that somebody should’ve replaced the thing years ago. Evan spent most of his first two weeks shadowing Karen in account management, a woman who’d worked there since before Evan was born and who called him “little Mercer” without a trace of irony, the same thing she’d called Grant a decade earlier.

“You’ve got your dad’s handwriting,” she told him one afternoon, watching him fill out an order form by hand because the system was down again. “Illegible. Runs in the family, I guess.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“It’s an observation.” She took the form from him, squinted at it, and handed it back. “Do the quantity again. That’s either a seven or a nine and it matters which.”

He’d made a real mistake his second week — misreading a customer’s reorder quantity and nearly sending out four hundred units of pipe fitting instead of forty, a mistake that would’ve cost the company real money if Karen hadn’t caught it during her afternoon check. She hadn’t made a big deal of it. She’d just circled the number in red pen, slid it back across his desk, and said, “Everybody does this once. You get one.” He’d felt his face go hot anyway, aware that if he’d been anybody else’s kid, it might have gone up the chain instead of staying quietly between the two of them.

That was the thing nobody had to explain to him and everybody understood anyway — he wasn’t just the new guy. He was Robert’s son, Grant’s brother, the third Mercer to come through that building’s front door expecting a nameplate eventually. People were friendly to him in a way that felt genuine and also, underneath it, careful. Nobody wanted to be the one who yelled at the boss’s kid.

Grant, for his part, treated him like exactly what he was — an annoying younger brother who’d finally gotten old enough to be useful. He’d swing by Evan’s desk two or three times a week, drop a stack of something on top of whatever Evan was working on, and say something like, “Congratulations, you’re my new favorite person, I need this filed by Thursday,” and then disappear before Evan could argue. Once he’d shown up with actual doughnuts, put one directly on Evan’s keyboard, and said, “Don’t tell Dad I left the floor,” which made no sense as a joke except that it was exactly the kind of thing Grant said, half performance, half genuine affection, and Evan had laughed because it was funny and because it felt good, still, after all these years, to be included by his older brother instead of just tolerated.