Chapter 1: The Suit That No Longer Fits
The suit jacket hit the polished conference table with a sound like a gunshot. It lay there, a puddle of expensive navy wool, the sleeves sprawling.
Herc stood over it, breathing hard. The shirt underneath, crisp white that morning, was now wrinkled and hung loose around his torso. The collar gaped.
Tim and Daisy exchanged a glance. The kind that carried a whole silent conversation over the thirty inches of laminated oak between them.
“Tell me again,” Herc said, his voice a tight, controlled wire. “Tell me how we’re walking into Pinnacle Capital next week to pitch a half-million dollar contract when I look like a goddamn kid playing dress-up in his dad’s closet.”
The fluorescent light overhead buzzed. It was the only sound for three long seconds. A motivational poster on the far wall, featuring a kitten clinging to a rope, urged them all to ‘HANG IN THERE!’
“It’s not that bad,” Tim offered. He ran a hand through his short-cropped brown hair. He was leaning back in his chair, trying for casual, but his shoulders were up near his ears. “We can get it tailored. Again.”
“Tailored.” Herc barked a laugh that held no humor. He picked up the jacket by one shoulder, holding it out. The waist suppressed for a 46-inch chest now looked like it could accommodate a small barrel. “You tailor a shirt. You tailor pants. You don’t tailor a fucking void. This is a tent. I’m disappearing inside it.”
Daisy cleared her throat. She’d been tracing the wood grain of the table with a fingernail. “Maybe it’s a new look. The consumptive genius. Very 19th-century poet.”
Herc shot her a look. She met it, her green eyes steady. Her red hair was a chaotic, brilliant splash against the beige wall behind her. She was the only one who ever dared.
“It’s not funny, Dais.”
“I know it’s not,” she said, her tone softening. “But you’re still you in there. Pinstripes or no pinstripes.”
“Clients don’t buy ‘you in here,’” he snapped, tapping his temple. “They buy the whole package. The guy who looks like he can move mountains. The guy who doesn’t look… frail.” He spat the last word like a curse.
The word hung in the sterile air. It was the first time he’d said it out loud.
Tim shifted, uncomfortable. “The medication is supposed to stabilize things, right? Dr. Shah said—”
“Dr. Shah says a lot of things,” Herc interrupted, turning to stare out the window. The view was of another office building, another grid of lit windows in the deepening blue dusk. “He says ‘manage expectations.’ He says ‘possible side effects.’ He doesn’t say how you’re supposed to look a boardroom full of sharks in the eye when you’ve lost twenty-two pounds in six weeks and your own belt is on the last hole.”
He let the jacket fall back to the table. The defeat in the gesture was worse than the anger.
Daisy pushed back her chair and stood. She walked around to him, not touching, just moving into his sightline. “Hey. Look at me.” He reluctantly turned his head. “We are not this suit. This business is not this suit. It’s the three of us in this shitty, rented room with the buzzing light and the stupid kitten poster. It’s the code Tim wrote that actually works. It’s the financial models I built that don’t collapse. It’s your stupid, brilliant, obstinate brain that stitches it all together and makes people believe it.” She paused. “So we go to Pinnacle. You in a goddamn sweat suit if you have to. We sell them because we’re better. Not because your shoulders fill out the wool.”
Herc held her gaze. Some of the rigid tension bled from his jaw. He looked, for a moment, just exhausted. The kind of deep fatigue no sleep could touch.
“A sweat suit,” he muttered, almost smiling.
“I’m talking designer. Maybe Juicy Couture. Make it a statement.”
Tim seized the opening. “We can pivot the presentation. Put me up front on the technical deep-dive. You come in for the strategy overview, the big picture. Less standing, more commanding from the head of the table.”
“They’ll think I’m weak,” Herc said, but the fire was gone from it. It was just a cold, hard fact he was examining.
“Then we make your weakness a strength,” Daisy countered. “We’re a consultancy. We adapt. We problem-solve. So your current problem is a metabolic speed-run that’s eating your muscle mass. Fine. We adapt the presentation. We problem-solve the image. We own the narrative before they can create it.”
Herc was silent, looking from Daisy’s determined face to Tim’s hopeful one, then down at the hollow shell of his jacket. The diagnosis—Graves’ disease—still felt like a foreign agent, a hostile takeover of his own body. The tremor in his hands he hid in his pockets. The sudden, skipped heartbeat that left him breathless. The relentless, invisible furnace burning him up from the inside. It was a secret enemy, and it was winning.
And these two, who had bet their lives on him, were asking him to lead while he was being dismantled.
He walked to the whiteboard. Their quarterly pipeline was scrawled in his own forceful handwriting. Pinnacle Capital. Vortex Logistics. Sanderson RevGen. Next to it, in the margin, were older, fainter words, a mantra from their first year: DON’T BE WEAK.
He picked up the eraser and wiped the mantra away in one smooth, decisive motion. The dust drifted down like ash.
“Okay,” he said, his back to them. “Tim, you’re on for the tech spec. I want the blockchain integration slides bulletproof. Daisy, re-jig the financials. I want them seeing ROI before I finish my first sentence.”
He turned around. The anger was gone, replaced by a pale, sharp focus. “We’ll go Tuesday. And I’m not wearing a sweat suit. We’ll stop at Bergman’s tomorrow. Buy a new jacket. One size down.”
“Two,” Daisy said quietly.
He gave a single, grim nod. “Two.” He looked at the pathetic heap of fabric on the table. “And burn this one.”
His phone vibrated on the table. He glanced at the screen. A reminder. 7 PM – Meds. And underneath, a text from a number he didn’t recognize: Mr. Hercules? This is Lisa from Dr. Shah’s office. Your latest labs have come back. He’d like to discuss adjusting your dosage. Can you call us tomorrow?
The world, the big picture, the strategy—it all telescoped down to that little screen, to the chemical ballet inside him that dictated whether he was a mountain-mover or a ghost in a suit.
He slid the phone into his pocket without a word, the movement hiding the slight, betraying shake in his fingers. “Lock up when you leave,” he said, his voice already distant, already calculating the next move, the next adaptation. He walked out, leaving the jacket behind.
The door clicked shut. The buzz of the light filled the room.
Tim let out a long, slow breath. “Jesus.”
Daisy didn’t move. She just stared at the empty doorway, her earlier bravado fading. “He’s scared, Tim.”
“I know.”
“No,” she said, finally looking at him, her eyes bright. “I mean, he’s really scared. And I don’t know how to fix that.”
On the table, the abandoned jacket’s sleeve had fallen off the edge. It swayed, gently, pointing at the floor.