Grasslight
Royston sat on the warm stone edge of the fountain and watched the water fall in straight lines and break.
It was Sunday. The towers over Bay and King were quiet, glass masks without faces. His laptop was in his bag. His phone lay face down beside him. In the office behind him, the model he had built waited on a server and hummed.
He should have been upstairs.
They were selling a parts plant in Ohio. Small metal pieces for bigger machines. The kind of work no one put in the front of a pitch. The buyer wanted “synergies.” The partners wanted the fee and the carry. Royston had run the numbers clean. Close one line, strip a shift, lever the thing hard. The returns were beautiful in the way cold numbers can be. The town around the plant did not appear in any cell.
He did not lie. That had been his promise when he came into this world in a borrowed suit and cheap shoes. You can push, you can sell, but you do not say what you know is false. Lately it felt as if the truth were a room getting smaller.
A little girl chased pigeons in the square. Her jacket was too big and flapped behind her. Her father stayed near with a coffee and the pride of a man whose wealth was standing right in front of him. The birds rose and fell. Her laugh cut through the air.
This is what the models never show, Royston thought. Birds and children and men who are not moving money through wires.
His phone buzzed. He didn’t look. He knew the script. Draft looks good. Need one more cut at downside. You okay to jump on a quick call? At twenty-seven he had a cardkey, a view, and a number beside his name that made people nod with impressed, wary smiles.
You can have everything the city respects and still feel hollow. The modern trick was learning how not to notice.
A shadow moved over his shoes.
A crow had landed on the rim of the fountain. It watched him with one bright eye. Its feathers were dark but not flat; there was a blue in them, deep as a bruise, quick as a flame. It looked like something that had seen all of this before and not been moved.
When he was eight he had lain in the grass behind his parents’ house and watched a crow walk the fence. The blades had brushed his ears. Ants moved over his wrist. Clouds went by like slow ships. He had not known what a fund was or why men fought over basis points. He had only known the clean ache of wanting to be true and large and good.
The crow dipped its beak into the falling water. A bead slid off and dropped. The ripples broke the tower’s reflection into a soft, cracked thing.
His phone buzzed again. He picked it up.
Three messages from the partner.
Need final view on jobs piece. Board is sensitive on optics.
You’re closest to this, Roy. Is there another way or do we just rip the band-aid?
Call me.
They called him Roy. It read easier, but hid the substance. Royston was the full data set; Roy was the filtered view.
He stood and walked to the thin strip of lawn by the sidewalk. A throat of green between stone and traffic. Some blades were bent where people had cut across. Some had straightened themselves again.
You are not here by accident, he thought. The thought felt placed in him, like a coin in a palm.
He called the partner.
“You’re quiet,” the older man said. Somewhere a glass touched a table. “Walk me through the headcount slide.”
“If we do it the way the buyer wants,” Royston said, “a third of the plant is gone inside eighteen months. More, if there’s a wobble. We can talk about retraining, but we both know what happens when the cycle turns.”
“That’s not new,” the partner said. “You’ve seen worse. What’s different?”
What’s different is that I can see the future too clearly when it isn’t mine, Royston thought. The silent floor. Men in driveways with their hands in their pockets. Kids watching their parents stare at kitchen tables. He saw it with the same hard clarity he brought to cash flows.
“Different thing is,” he said, “we don’t need to do it this way. There’s enough margin in the work to keep the second shift. We make less. They keep a life. It’s not heroic. It’s just not predatory.”
The line went still.
“You think the committee takes that?” the partner asked.
“I think they listen if you push it,” Royston said. “If you don’t, they won’t.”
The partner laughed once. No joy in it, only wear. “You’re a good man, Roy. But your job isn’t to rewrite capitalism on a Sunday. It’s to tell us if the math works. Does the math work?”
“Yes,” Royston said. It was true. That was what made it hurt.
“Then give me the clean version,” the partner said. “We’ll say what we need to say about community. You’re in the room Tuesday. Big step. Don’t overcomplicate it.”
The unspoken was clear: Be sharp. Be useful. Be the man we are pushing forward. A whole future hung there—New York, bigger funds, bigger rooms, his name on memos that moved markets. All bought with a simple habit: see less than you know.
Love refuses that, he thought. Real love sees everything and doesn’t look away. That is why it costs.
“I can’t give you that version,” he said.
He heard the words land. They had weight.
“What does that mean?” the partner asked.
“It means,” Royston said, “if I present the deal, I’m going to tell the board we have two real options, and that one of them costs us money we can afford and saves jobs they can’t replace. I’ll say it straight. You can keep me off the deck. But if I’m in the room, that’s what I’m saying.”
There was a longer pause. He could feel the man thinking: risk, trouble, the annoyance of conscience in a clean machine.
“You know what you’re putting at stake,” the partner said.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Because he remembered what it felt like to know right from wrong without effort. Because the years had added noise, but not enough to drown that early clarity. Because love for people you will never meet is still love, and a man who steps over it too many times turns stone.
“Because otherwise I’m lying,” Royston said. “And I don’t lie. You hired me on that.”
A soft scrape came over the line, a hand on a face or a desk. Then a sigh.
“Send me both versions in an hour,” the partner said. “We’ll see how brave the board feels. And Roy—”
“Royston,” he said.
Silence. Then, softer, “Royston. Don’t make this a habit. The world doesn’t reward this the way you think.”
“It’s not the world I’m trying to please,” he said.
The call ended.
He stayed where he was and let the fear wash over him. First the cooling of voices. Then the promotion drifting out of reach. Then the slow nudge toward the margins. The life he’d built on poise and discipline shifting under him.
Joy is not a mood, he thought. It’s the body catching up to the truth.
The crow hopped into the grass and pecked at something near his shoe. It looked up once, as if checking that he was still there, then rose. Its wings beat the air, rough rhyme, raw rhythm. It cleared the bank’s stone face and tipped once in the pale sky before sliding away.
Royston went back to the bench and opened his laptop.
He wrote the memo in plain words. Two paths. Two futures. One with higher returns and hollowed streets. One with enough profit and enough mercy to let fathers keep buying jackets a size too big. He didn’t preach. He set out the truth and the cost.
On the email he added a line: Happy to walk through both scenarios, live and stand by my recommendation.
He sent it.
The towers still stood. The city kept its indifferent hum. Somewhere in Ohio a light burned above a machine that had not yet been switched off.
Royston watched the father finish the last of his coffee while the girl laughed and pointed at the pigeons. He watched the grass, the stone, the sky. The simple things Emerson wrote about and Tolstoy would have understood. The same current moving through them all, urging him on.
The career would call again. It always did. But he had turned, even slightly, toward another measure. He could feel it as clearly as he had at eight years old in the summer field: the sense that life itself—from crow to boardroom—was on his side if he stayed true.
He stood and walked toward the street. The day did not change. He had.
All stories published by Legacy Writers are works of fiction created with the assistance of artificial intelligence under human direction. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.