He worked his jaw before he continued. “A year after I started as CFO, the vice president of finance worked on a project with one of our sites in an area with a boom. Remember the surge in northwestern North Dakota and northeastern Montana almost ten years ago?”

I’d been on the other side of Montana in college, but the boom had been national news. Towns had been doubling in size as oil field workers and their families had moved to the area. Man camps had sprung up wherever someone could set up trailers and the bare necessities for facilities. Apartment buildings had flown up as if they were made of Legos. Once small towns with little more than a few franchises had become homes to giant department stores, chain restaurants, and strings of hotels that were immediately booked upon opening. All those workers’ families had needed places to stay and housing couldn’t keep up.

As well, the steep increase in major crime had outpaced the growth of local law enforcement. They’d called it the Wild West. Women had told stories about how parking lots of places they’d frequented their entire life became their worst nightmare seconds after dark.

Then the boom had crested. More stories about layoffs, ghost towns, and abandoned man camps had filled the news. King Oil had been featured several times. That hadn’t been out of the ordinary. They were a Montana company, the state’s pride and joy.

I vaguely recalled some other stories involving King Oil just as I was finishing my master’s program. Reports of how layoffs had affected the workers involved. Disgruntled accusations that the repercussions hadn’t reached the top tiers of the company.

Going to college in Montana meant I’d been insulated from it. Media in the state wasn’t going to hunt a family they considered royalty, local boys who had done well, who had provided many of the residents with jobs at oil fields and the refinery. Montana was blue collar through and through, and they didn’t forget that Gentry and Aiden had gotten their start wearing cowboy boots and raising cattle.

National news was different, and I’d had the luxury to ignore it. Aiden wouldn’t have been able to. He would’ve taken it personally. He would’ve internalized the stress and his feelings and done everything in his power to make sure it never happened again.

“I remember the stories,” I said. “Sebastian was fired?”

Aiden nodded. “He reviewed his plans with me, and I signed off. The buck stopped at me.”

“For the record, I agree with Gentry. But I know you don’t see it that way.”