Chapter 4: The Threshold

The back step ran cold. The house was a dark, un-moving monument to a life that now belonged to someone else. Davidson's phone, with its single, seismic text message, was charged wire in his hand.

The forty-eight hours begin now. - J.B.

He could not go back inside. The air between them was a battlefield of pain and unspoken accusation. He rose, his body on autopilot of raw avoidance, and walked toward his truck. The engine roared alive, a growling, familiar rumble that grounded him for a moment. He drove without destination, the two-lane highway uncoiling before him like a band of gray.

He had been to the one place that made sense at two in the morning: the rig. The night shift was on, a minimum number of individuals working under the cold, cruel glow of the floodlamps. The incessant, rhythmic groan of equipment was a welcome assault. It was a sound that demanded attention, that gave him no room for the screaming madness in his head.

He drew back further, not wanting to have to explain that he was there, and simply watched. This was his church. This was where he'd gained respect, meaning, and an identity built on actual outcomes. He'd fixed what had been damaged here. He couldn't fix what was crumbling in his own living room.

His phone buzzed again on the passenger seat. He leapt, expecting another message. It was a call. From Alan Price.

Davidson stared at it, his heart racing. Answering felt like an added betrayal. Remaining silent felt like cowardice. On the fifth ring, he picked it up.

"Ekon."

"Mr. Ekon," Price's stiff, unflappable voice chimed in. "I trust you received Mr. Brian's message."

"I did." Davidson's voice was rough, bare.

"Good. Logistics, I imagine. A corporate flight will depart Midland International at 0800 on Monday. You will be picked up from home in a car at 0630. Your accommodation in New York is reserved. I am flying this dossier on the first project Mr. Brian would like you to analyze on the flight. We are our offshore business in the Gulf. The file is encrypted. The password is 'Anointing'."

The raw, sheer effectiveness of it took Davidson's breath away. It was a tsunami, and he was on the shore, with the exact time of impact being read to him. They weren't requesting; they were dictating. The choice, apparently, had been made for him the instant he'd stepped into that penthouse.

Mr. Price, Davidson began, one last, desperate grab for something to cling to. "This is. happening too fast. I have a family. I have to.

"Mr. Brian recognizes you have other commitments," Price interrupted, not rudely, but with the bluntness of a man reading from a script. "The initial commitment is for a ninety days' evaluation period. You will be paid twenty times your present salary, and an optional bonus at successful completion. There is a special fund in abeyance for the moving and maintenance of your family's Texas residence during the period. The arrangements are contained in the letter."

Twenty times. It was a body blow. It was life-changing money. College money, mortgages taken out, security. It was such a bribe that it felt like a gun.

"I… I need to talk to my wife," Davidson managed to get out, the words sounding feeble.

"Of course," said Price. "The car will be at 0630 Monday. We look forward to seeing you, Mr. Ekon. Goodnight."

The phone clicked dead.

Davidson hung the phone on the seat as though it were hot coal. He gripped the steering wheel in white knuckles. The rig's rum was far away, replaced by a piercing, burning whine in his brain. They had bought him. They had calculated the price of his soul and laid the cash on the table without batting an eye.

He drove home as the first light of dawn crept onto the eastern horizon. The house was still. He crept quietly inside, a spectral figure floating from room to room. He did not venture upstairs. He went to the messy, little desk in the back corner of the living room, booted up the ancient computer, and opened his email.

There it was. From [e-mail]. Subject line: Welcome & Onboarding.

He opened it. The letter was a masterpiece of company logistics. Flight times, an address in Manhattan for a rental apartment, a virtual key, a catalog of the obscene salary package. And at the end, the encrypted file attachment. *Gulf_Deepwater_Project_Gamma.p*f*

His finger over the mouse. The password echoed in his head. Anointing. No longer a word, but a trademark.

He typed it in.

The file opened. It was several hundred pages of engineering diagrams, budget forecasts, geologic studies, and risk assessments on a deep-water drilling operation that made his Texas rig look like a kid's toy. It was high-tech, brilliant, and stupendously ambitious. And Joe Brian asked his advice about it.

A frantic, almost feral energy ran through his blood. This was it. This was the proof. It wasn't a dream. This was real. The magnitude of the challenge, the puzzle in the brain, a call of the sirens he could not ignore. Melissa's words—shining illusion—echoed, but were drowned out by the pure, magnetic power of the work.

He ran off the first six pages. The printer hummed to life, spewing out pages dense with data and graphs. The sound was like a scream in the quiet house.

A groan on the floor above. Davidson froze, his heart sticking in his throat. He listened intently, but there was no other sound. He gathered up the hot pages, his fingertips drumming to get to it, to solve, to know.

He spent the next hour devouring the papers, jotting down notes in margins with a munched pencil. He was so absorbed he never noticed her coming down.

"What is all this?"

He pulled his head back up. Melissa stood in the bottom of the stairs, robed, her face pale and stretched. She was staring at the scattered papers on the kitchen table, her eyes huge with a new, dawning horror.

"It's work," he said too quickly, automatically moving forward to cover the pages. "A project. For. for Brian.".

She moved in closer, her gaze mapping out the diagram of a massive drilling rig. "He sends you a task at five on Saturday morning?" Her tone was low, dangerously so. "Davidson. I want you to look at me."

He forced himself to meet her gaze.

“You’ve already decided, haven’t you?” The hurt in her voice was gone, replaced by a flat, chilling certainty. “All of this… the fight last night… It was just theater. You’re going.”

He opened his mouth to deny it, to say he was still thinking, still deciding. But the lie wouldn’t form. The pages in his hands were his answer. The thrill he’d felt unlocking the file was his answer.

He didn't speak.

The silence spoke volumes.

Melissa's face creased for one lone, anguished moment before she constructed it anew as a mask of stone. She nodded slowly, a terrible finality in the gesture.

"Okay," she whispered. She stepped back toward the stairs.

"Mel, wait—" he started, half-leaping out of his chair.

She did not turn back. "The car is coming Monday at six-thirty," she said, her voice devoid of any emotion whatsoever. "You should be ready."

She disappeared up the stairs. A moment later, he heard the door to their bedroom shut.

He sat alone in the kitchen, all the plans for a future that at present felt as cold and deep as the ocean in the documents spread out in front of him. He had gone too far. There was no going back.

The sun rose in its entirety, and a bright, cheerful light flooded the kitchen, looking utterly grotesque. The kids' wake-up sounds, their happy chatter ringing down from above, were the noises of a life he had given up willingly just the moment before.

He had thirty-six hours.

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