“That wasn’t my question.”
“I don’t know.”
Reuben handed the pages back.
“Good. Start there.”
The financial timing could not have been worse.
The lease was signed.
Insurance had been paid.
New shelving had arrived.
Reuben had hours on the clock.
Isaiah had ordered hoses, filters, and seal kits based on eighteen-unit projections.
The contract that justified the expenses was now paused because the testing system designed to prevent another hydraulic failure had failed to catch another hydraulic failure.
Two days later, Dale Pruitt walked into Callaway Reworks.
He did not make fun of the warehouse.
He looked impressed despite himself.
Rows of tagged components lined the walls. Three tractors sat in build stations. A fourth occupied the test bay with pressure lines attached.
Dale took his time.
Then he entered Isaiah’s office and placed a folded sheet of paper on the desk.
“Sixty-eight thousand dollars.”
Isaiah stared at him.
“For what?”
“Everything.”
Dale gestured through the glass.
“Inventory, tools, customer list, lease assumption if landlord approves, name if you want to sell it. I take the headache. You walk away with more money than most nineteen-year-olds see in one place.”
Isaiah unfolded the paper.
It was real.
Not a joke.
Not twenty-six hundred for scrap.
Sixty-eight thousand cash at closing.
Dale sat across from him.
“You proved the concept. I’ll give you that. You know how to make money out of dead equipment.”
Isaiah kept reading.
“But scaling eats people,” Dale continued. “You got rent now. Payroll. Warranty exposure. A seventy-thousand-dollar contract on hold because your hydraulics still got ghosts. There’s no shame in taking real money before the lesson gets expensive.”
Isaiah looked up.
“Why do you want it?”
Dale smiled.
“Because you proved there’s money in it.”
“At the auction you said scrap.”
“At the auction I had the information available to me.”
“You had the same tractors.”
“I didn’t have your grandfather’s ledger or your time.”
That answer was honest enough to earn Isaiah’s respect.
Dale tapped the offer.
“Think about it.”
He left the paper on the desk.
That night Isaiah took it home.
He set it beside his plate at the kitchen table.
Denise read the first page while he ate.