If You Recognize Yourself

This is a story about a man who never existed. You will still recognize him.

His name is Edward Williams. His company is invented. His family is invented. Everything he is about to walk through is real. I lived most of it. I have coached leaders through the rest of it. And if you are the person I wrote this for, you already know it before you turn the page.

You played a sport at a level most people only watched. You were tougher than the guy next to you because you had to be. You earned everything you have through output, through refusing to be outworked. And somewhere between the field and the office, you lost the thing that made you dangerous.

You have rehearsed a conversation with someone on your team for years, and you still have not had it.

You are the reason your company cannot grow, and some part of you already knows it.

If any of that lands, read this book. Then keep it where you can reach it. This is not the kind of book you finish on a flight and forget. It is the kind you build from, and then come back to, because what Edward builds takes real time, and longer to remember, and you are going to want the reminder more than once. I wrote it so a man could actually build what Edward builds, in his own company, with his own people, not just nod along and feel understood for an afternoon.

You are not reading Edward’s story.

You are reading yours.

Matt

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PART ONE: THE GAP

Chapter 1: The Monday That Broke Him

“Boss. It’s Sal.”

Wind on the phone. The flat roar of a man standing somewhere with nothing around him to block it.

Edward has the phone against his ear before he knows he reached for it. The room is black. The clock on the nightstand says 5:21.

“Sal. Where are you?”

“Roof of the bank on Keystone. Been up here since two.” A scuff of boot on metal. “Number four’s locked up. I can smell the windings from here. Zero to ground on two legs and the contactor’s welded shut.”

“Repair or replace.”

“Replace the compressor. Replacing the whole unit’s a forty-thousand-dollar conversation and a six-week lead time, and there’s three good years left in this thing if we keep it fed.”

“Number?”

“Ninety-four hundred with the refrigerant and the drier and the reclaim. Supply house in Fishers has one on the shelf. They open at seven. I can have it hung by ten and pulling a vacuum by noon.”

The alarm goes off at 5:30 while Sal is still talking. Edward reaches across and kills it with two fingers without breaking the sentence.

“Do it. Be at the counter when they open.”

“You sure? That’s a big one for a branch bank.”

“I’m sure. They open at nine and it’s supposed to hit ninety.”

Alison shifts beside him. She doesn’t open her eyes. “What time is it.”

“Early.”

She doesn’t say anything else.

There was a year she woke up before him with the coffee already going, and asked him what was on his plate that day. He can’t remember the week that stopped. She isn’t angry. She’s a woman who said a thing out loud more than once to a man who was always half a job site away, and then stopped spending the words on him.

Her phone is already lit on the nightstand. Rotterdam is six hours ahead, and something of hers is sitting on a dock.

Edward swings his legs off the bed and sets his feet on the cold floor. “Sal. How long have you known it’s the compressor?”

Wind. “Since about three.”

“That was two and a half hours ago.”

“Yeah.”

“Then why’d you call me?”

Sal doesn’t answer right away, and when he does he sounds almost apologetic about it.

“Because it’s ninety-four hundred.”

Edward sits with that in the dark for a second.

“You could’ve called Kevin.”

There’s a pause with wind in it. It runs about three seconds.

“Yeah,” Sal says.

Edward hangs up at 5:38 with the phone still warm in his hand.

• • •

He showers. Dresses without turning on the light. Pours coffee into a travel mug and carries it down the hall.

Jane’s door is shut. A thin blue line of light leaks out along the carpet. Sixteen, awake already, somewhere inside that phone. He stops with his hand almost raised. The words are right there. He doesn’t knock.

The twins' door is open. Grace is a lump under a blanket with one arm around a stuffed cat. Francis is sideways across his bed, one sock on, his baseball glove on the pillow beside his head where another kid would keep a stuffed animal. His backpack sits on the chair with the books in it and the zipper closed. Ten years old and he packs his bag the way his father loads a truck.

Edward stands in the doorway for three seconds. Then the phone buzzes in his pocket and he keeps walking.

He’s in the truck by 6:15. The cab is spotless. Nothing on the mats, mug in the holder, phone in the cradle. The truck is about the last thing left that he still holds to the old line.

Twenty-two months he’s been rehearsing one conversation with Kevin Marsh, and he doesn’t rehearse it today. He’s too tired.

• • •

The lot at 6:28 is gravel and cold and half dark. Two service trucks already gone. It smells like diesel and cut pipe and the burnt coffee somebody left on the warmer over the weekend. The shop door sticks on the bottom hinge the way it has since March.

Jake Peterson is at his tailgate sorting hangers into a bucket. Six-two, twenty-three years in the trade, hands like a catcher’s mitt.

“Got a second,” Jake says. It isn’t a question.

“Walk in with me.”

“No. This is a lot conversation.” Jake drops a handful of threaded rod in the bucket. “Richmond. My tin guys and Ortiz’s plumbers have been climbing over each other in that fourth-floor corridor for three weeks. Same ceiling, same elevation. Their overhead’s landing right where my main has to go.”

“Whose fault?”

“Nobody’s. That’s what I’m telling you. Nobody’s run a coordination meeting since the drawings came out in January. We’re building it twice and paying for it twice, and I’ve told our PM about it twice.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said he’d look at it.” Jake looks at him. “Twice.”

Edward already has his phone out. “I’ll handle it.”

Jake picks up the bucket and holds it, and for a second he looks like he’s going to say something long. He doesn’t.

“That’s what I mean,” he says, and walks off toward the yard.

Edward files it where he files Jake. Good hand. Likes to be right in the morning.

• • •

At 6:52 the phone rings and it’s Jake.

“They’re gone.”

“Who’s gone?”

“Ortiz’s guys. All four. Ruben put them in the van eight minutes ago. Something got said about a hanger.”

By 7:04 Edward has Ruben Ortiz on the phone, twenty-nine years in business, a man who doesn’t get talked out of things by superintendents. It costs a promise, a half day of All Star labor to move sixty feet of duct main that was hung right the first time, and a tone of voice Edward hasn’t had to use in a while. He talks him back onto the roof.

“I’m going back up because it’s you,” Ruben says. “Not because it’s fixed.”

At 7:11 Edward calls the general contractor’s superintendent and smooths the schedule before it turns into a letter.

At 7:15 Megan Harrell is in his doorway with her laptop open on her forearm like a waiter’s tray.

“Don’t be mad.”

“Never a great opener.”

“The office tower. Eight hundred and change, due at noon.” She turns the screen. “We carried the duct insulation twice. It’s in our sheet metal takeoff and Tri-State carried it in their number too. And their scope letter excludes the plenum, so nobody’s carrying that at all.”

“How far off are we?”

“Sixty-one thousand, wrong direction. If we win it the way it sits, we build the plenum for free.”

Edward is already writing. “When did you find it?”

“Six-forty.”

“You’ve been here since when.”

“Five.” She says it flat, the way you’d say a zip code. “I’ve got it. I need two things from you. Tell me which way we go on the plenum before ten. And somebody’s got to call the client and walk the budget number back before he reads it off a bid form, and it should be you, because he’s going to want it to be you.”

“I’ll call him now.”

She looks at him for about half a second longer than she needs to.

“Okay,” she says.

“You’re a machine, Meg.”

“Yeah,” she says, and goes.

He hangs up at 7:22. Two fires out, and it isn’t seven-thirty, and he hasn’t eaten, and he hasn’t touched one thing on his own list.

• • •

The nine o’clock is in the conference room off the shop, where the table has a chip out of the laminate on the near edge that catches your sleeve if you lean on it. The box fan in the window runs on low because the unit over this side of the building can’t keep up. The door doesn’t latch. Somebody’s phone is face-up on the table buzzing and nobody picks it up. Somebody else is eating a gas station biscuit out of a paper sleeve.

Five project managers, plus Kevin down at the end with the yellow legal pad. Marcus Webb leaning back with one ankle on his knee. On the whiteboard behind them, in dead blue marker, somebody wrote Q3 GOALS three months ago, and under it two bullets.

Improve project delivery.

Grow revenue.

Eighteen million dollars a year moves through this room. Edward’s at the head of the table and he doesn’t know one single true thing about how any of it is going.

“Greenfield,” he says. “Where are we on the change orders.”

Andrea Walsh flips back through her notebook. She fills it out whether or not anyone reads it. “I think we sent three last week, I’d have to check the log.”

She keeps flipping. She’s going to find it. Edward can see her finding it.

“There’s four,” he says. “Two approved, one’s sitting with the architect, and the fourth is the gas line reroute we never priced.”

Andrea’s hand stops on the page. She looks at it for a second. Then she closes the notebook and sets her pen on top of it.

Nobody says anything about that.

“Richmond. What’s our labor efficiency?”

Kevin looks at his phone. “I’ll get that to you this afternoon.”

“Westfield. Do we hit margin?”

Marcus rocks forward. “We’re fine.”

“Fine as in you’ve looked, or fine as in it feels fine?”

Marcus grins at him. “It feels great.”

The room laughs, and Marcus takes it as an opening. He tells them about the walkthrough at Northside on Friday, where the owner’s rep took the drawings off him and started showing them to the facilities guy like the whole thing was his own idea. Marcus stood there and let him do it. You let a man sell it to himself. It’s a four-minute story and it’s a good one. Laura laughs so hard she has to set her coffee down.

Edward laughs too.

“Curbs on Westfield,” he says, when it settles. “Do I release them or not?”

Four people look at Kevin. Kevin looks at Edward.

“Release them,” Edward says.

At 9:47 they file out feeling productive because they sat in a room together for forty-seven minutes. Nothing was measured. Nothing was decided. Edward stands there alone in front of the dead blue marker and can’t remember who wrote it, or the last time anybody in this building looked at a goal and knew, with a number, whether they hit it.

Rocky Lee is waiting in the hall with a single sheet of paper.

“Receivables over sixty days are at two hundred and ten thousand,” Rocky says. “Forty-one of it’s Cardinal Ridge, and they’re at ninety-three days. I’ve called their accounting four times.”

“That’s my account. I sold it.”

“I know.”

“Give it another thirty. I’ll call Cardinal Ridge myself.”

Rocky folds the sheet once and goes back to his office.

• • •

At 11:15 Marcus drops a signed contract on Edward’s desk and stands there grinning.

“Northside Surgical. Six hundred grand. Signed this morning.”

“That’s a great win.”

It is. Marcus books more work than the next two people put together and wears it like a jacket he never takes off. He also hands his sold jobs to the field with the numbers scrawled on the back of a business card, and he skips the transition meetings. Two weeks ago he talked over a coordinator in front of the customer until she got up and left the room. She stayed gone ten minutes.

“Retention on this one’s ten percent through closeout,” Edward says. “Push it to five at fifty.”

“You want me to go back in?”

“I want you to go back in.”

Marcus shrugs happily and leaves. Edward puts the contract in the drawer.

On Richmond Place, the job that pulled him out of bed this morning, Marcus has been sitting on a hundred-and-forty-thousand-dollar overrun for three months without putting it on a single report. Kevin has raised it twice. Megan raised it once, carefully. Edward has done nothing about any of it.

At 11:31 the phone rings. It’s the project manager for the general contractor on Richmond.

“Edward, hi. I’m reconciling your billing before we cut this month’s check and I’ve got a problem.”

“Okay.”

“There’s twenty-eight thousand in your April application for the chase relocation on four through six. I don’t have a signed change order for it.”

“Your superintendent stood on four with my foreman in March and told him to move it. So we moved it. Forty feet of eight-inch, two weeks of ceiling access, a full weekend of overtime.”

“I believe you.”

“Then pay it.”

“I can’t pay a number my owner hasn’t approved, and my owner approves signed changes.” She isn’t unkind about it. That’s the part that gets him. “Send me the change order and I’ll walk it into his office myself.”

“There isn’t one.”

“Then I don’t have anything to walk in.”

He calls the superintendent, who left Richmond in May and is on a warehouse in Plainfield now.

“I’m not saying you’re wrong.” A turn signal clicking. “I’m saying I’m not signing something six months after the fact for something in March. That’s not on me.”

So he calls the guy who runs operations for the whole general contractor, who’s been golfing with Edward for nine years. He picks up in fifteen seconds and is warm the entire call. Edward tries the relationship. Then he tries the nine years. Then he tries the thing that’s worked his whole life, being the guy who wants it more.

“I’m gonna be straight with you, because I like you,” he says. “My hands are tied on this one. What I can do is look at it at closeout.”

Every contractor alive knows what closeout means.

The last call is to the project manager who ran Richmond back in March.

“I wrote it up,” he says. “March fourteenth. Sent it to you and asked whether you wanted it billed time and material or lump sum, because if we went lump I needed to know how you wanted the overtime carried.”

Edward opens his email and searches and finds it. March 14. Then he finds his own reply.

March 23.

“By the time I heard back, the super was already moving to the other job,” he says. He isn’t defensive and he isn’t accusing anybody. He’s answering the question. “It kind of got away from me after that.”

Twenty-eight thousand dollars leaves the building at 11:52 on a Monday morning over one piece of paper.

Last year All Star Mechanical did eighteen million dollars and cleared a little over a million of it. Twenty-eight thousand is two and a half percent of everything the company earned in a year, gone in twenty-one minutes.

He doesn’t tell her any of that. He tells her he’ll get back to her. He sets the phone face-up on the desk and looks at it.

• • •

At 2:15 Kevin knocks on the doorframe with the yellow pad.

“Got a minute?”

“Yeah.”

“Westfield. Dontae cracked his wrist Saturday, he’s out six weeks minimum.” Kevin sits. He’s already written it out in block capitals. “I want to move my Northside lead over to cover and backfill him with the second-year guy.”

Edward thinks about it for maybe eight seconds.

“Don’t move your Northside guy. Northside starts underground in nine days and he’s the only one who’s been through a hospital inspection. Put the other one on Westfield and have Jake cover him two mornings a week until he’s got his feet.”

Kevin nods slowly. “Yeah. That works.”

He draws a line through the top of the page, through his own handwriting, and writes Edward’s version underneath it in the same block capitals. Then he tears the sheet off, folds it once, and puts it in his shirt pocket.

“Anything else?” Edward says.

“No.”

• • •

At 4:10 his phone buzzes. It’s Jake.

Ruben pulling 2 of 4 tmrw. Says they’ll be back Wed. Same corridor. FYI.

Forty-five minutes this morning bought him nine hours.

At 4:15 he stands up. Grace has club at 4:30 at the rec center twelve minutes away and he can make it, and his hand is on the truck keys when the phone rings. It’s the general contractor on Greenfield, and it isn’t a fire. It’s a courtesy call about a schedule shift that could have waited until morning.

He means to keep it short. He doesn’t. He’s a man who takes the call.

He texts Alison from the truck at 4:34. Running twenty minutes late. Save me a seat.

He runs forty.

The sound hits him before the door is all the way open. Shoes tearing at a hardwood floor, a whistle, a hundred people yelling the same syllable at the same time. He comes in through the side of the gym in his work boots and a polo that smells like coffee and cut pipe. It’s the second set. The scoreboard bolted to the cinderblock says nineteen and twenty-two, and he has to watch two points to work out which number is his daughter’s.

Alison is on the third row of the pulled-out bleachers between two other moms. She doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t save him a seat. Jane is a few feet down the row with one earbud in and her phone face-down on her knee, actually watching her sister. She’s not gone. He just hasn’t given her a reason to look up at him in a while. Francis is on the bottom row turning a baseball against his fingers, seams under the pads, without looking at it.

Grace is back right in the rotation, hands off her knees, up on her toes. She’s the smallest kid on that floor by four inches and she’s the loudest thing in the building. A free ball floats over with two other girls under it and she calls them both off before it clears the net. Grace calls everything. Grace calls balls that were never hers. Every few serves she checks the door. This time he’s in it. Her whole face opens and she waves at him with both arms, big and unmissable, until Val says her name and pulls her back into the point.

Her bag is shoved under the bench with a shirt spilling out of it, WILLIAMS across the back in letters that would fit a grown woman, and a number Grace has never worn.

She rotates to serve at twenty-four. She bounces the ball twice, spins it once in her hands, breathes out, and hits it flat and heavy into the seam. It drops clean between two girls who each thought it was the other one’s. That’s the second set, and the match.

Edward doesn’t know where she got the routine.

Four feet away, Jane taps her heel twice against the bleacher without any idea she’s doing it.

He missed the whole first set and most of the second.

After the handshake line the team sits down along the baseline with their backs against the wall pads, shoulder to shoulder, legs out, and the coach gives them a few minutes. Her name is Val. She has a whistle she doesn’t use and a clipboard she never looks at. Edward checks his watch when she starts.

“Reese. First set, you shanked the first ball you touched and your platform was all elbows. Next one came harder and you got your feet there before the ball did, and you passed it to the setter’s forehead. Nobody told you to fix that. You fixed it.” She points the clipboard at her. “This week, fifty passes off the garage door. Feet first, arms second. Thursday I’m serving at you.”

“Okay, Coach.”

“Emerson. Second set you covered your hitter twice when there wasn’t a person in this gym looking at you, and you were the only one moving. Nobody sees that but me, and I see it every time.” She moves down the line. “One thing this week. You pulled up on the ball by the bench and let it land, and it was in. Chase one into the bleachers Thursday and I’ll never say it again.”

“Yes, Coach.”

“Grace.” Grace sits up straighter. “Best serve of your season in the first set, and you rushed the two before it. You’ve got a routine. Use it on all three, not just when you’re feeling it. Two bounces and a breath. That’s it.”

“Two,” Grace says, and none of the air goes out of her.

“Josie.” Down the line. Then the next one.

Edward looks at his watch again when she says the last name. A few minutes, first name to last.

Nobody walks off that floor unsure where they stand.

He’s standing at the end of the bleachers when Grace comes off the court.

“That takes you how long?”

Val looks back at the floor, then at him. “A few minutes. Same few minutes every week.” She pulls the band out of her hair and puts it back exactly the way it was. “They each get a thing they did today, named, specific. One thing to work on, one and not three. And a day it’s due.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

Val looks at him a second, like she’s deciding something, then flips her clipboard over, tears a strip off the bottom of the stat sheet clipped to it, and writes on it fast, the pen digging in. “Here.” She holds it out before he can ask why. “Guy straightened me out years back, when I still had my own place and couldn’t get through a Tuesday without something catching fire. Best money I ever spent.” She nods at the strip in his hand. “Tuesday, one o’clock, that’s just when he sees anybody new. You call, he already knows why.” Then, already moving past him, “I know who you are, by the way. She looks for you.”

Edward takes the torn strip because it would be strange not to, folds it once without really looking at it, and has it stuffed in his shirt pocket and mostly out of his head by the time Grace is buckled into the truck.

She hooks the ball cart with one hand and drags it toward the storage door and goes.

Grace runs at the truck with her kneepads shoved down around her ankles, dragging a club bag almost as long as she is, wearing the shirt now, hanging past her knees.

“Daddy, did you see my serve?”

“I saw it,” he says. He saw one serve, and it wasn’t the one she means. “That was a rocket, Grace.”

She beams and climbs in and starts telling Francis the whole story at a volume the next court could use. Jane gets in, clicks her belt, and gives him a quiet “hey, Dad” before the earbud goes back in.

Francis reaches through the open window and grabs Edward’s sleeve. “Can we get Dairy Queen?”

“Not tonight, bud. Let’s get home.”

Francis nods but keeps hold of the sleeve until Edward opens the door.

They’re almost out of the lot when Francis says, “Dad. Did your team win it all your senior year?”

Edward finds his son’s eyes in the mirror. “No, bud. We got close.”

“But you were captain.”

“Yeah.”

“Did Coach Isaac coach you?”

Edward hasn’t said that name out loud in fifteen years. “How do you know about Coach Isaac?”

Francis shrugs and looks out the window. “It’s on the school’s website. There’s a picture.”

Then he goes quiet, the way he does, and Edward drives home with his hands at ten and two.

• • •

By 9:15 the twins are down and Jane’s door is shut with the light on behind it. The kitchen is spotless. There’s a plate of chicken and rice in the microwave with a sticky note on the door in Alison’s handwriting that says Dinner. Upstairs the TV runs a show she started without him.

He eats standing at the counter. Cold chicken, lukewarm rice. He rinses the plate, sets it in the dishwasher, and carries himself into the office.

The dashboard loads. Eighteen million dollars, trailing twelve. The best year in the history of the company. His insurance broker takes him to lunch twice a year and tells him he’s crushing it.

Under the revenue line is net margin, six percent. For this trade that’s fine. Decent, even. The number that’s got him is underneath it, where the cash actually lives. On eighteen million dollars of work the company cleared a little over a million, and two hundred and ten thousand of that is sitting in receivables he can’t get people to pay, money already earned and already spent, standing out in other men’s parking lots doing nothing.

Under that is the number nobody sees but him. The credit line is drawn to six hundred thousand. Alison doesn’t know that. It’s the only real thing he’s ever kept from her, and he tells himself it isn’t keeping if she doesn’t ask.

He takes a beer out of the mini fridge under the desk. The one she doesn’t know about, or knows about and has decided not to mention.

He pulls the electric bill off the stack by the printer, turns it over, and clicks a pen.

5:21. Sal. Replace the compressor or repair it.

6:52. Jake. Who eats the half day when the plumbers walk.

7:04. Ruben. What it costs to get four men back on a roof.

7:15. Megan. The plenum, and who makes the call.

9:14. The Greenfield change orders, which Andrea had under her thumb.

9:31. Release the curbs on Westfield.

9:52. Cardinal Ridge. Thirty more days or collections.

11:22. Retention on Northside.

11:31. Fight the twenty-eight thousand or eat it.

2:15. Who covers Westfield.

4:15. Take the call or don’t.

Eleven.

He hasn’t gotten to the afternoon voicemails. He hasn’t gotten to the two texts from Marcus, or the thing Laura asked him in the hallway. He sets the pen down, because he doesn’t want the number.

Eleven, on a Monday nobody would remember. Call it twenty-eight in a week.

Not one of them was his job. Every one of them he could’ve answered in his sleep.

He’s the reason this company got as big as it is. He’s the reason it stopped.

Jake told him at 6:30 in the gravel exactly what was going to happen, and it happened at 6:52, and Edward spent forty-five minutes fixing the thing Jake told him not to let start. It starts again tomorrow at seven. Andrea had the answer under her thumb. The PM on Richmond wrote the change order on March fourteenth and then waited nine days on a man who was busy talking a plumber back onto a roof. His people aren’t weak. He never built anything that would let them be strong without him.

Val sat ten girls down on a baseline for two minutes, and every kid on that team walked out of that gym knowing exactly where they stood and exactly what’s due Thursday. She has a day job. She has four kids of her own. She can drive out of that lot and the team keeps playing.

He has seventy-five people and eighteen million dollars, and a service tech stood on a roof for two and a half hours in the dark because he couldn’t think of one other person in the building to call.

He has a word for it he’s never said out loud. Not to Alison. Not to himself.

Trapped.

This is the morning he starts to understand that he’s the reason it will never be worth more.

• • •

He finishes the beer.

He thinks about the kid who walked on at eighteen, forty pounds light for the depth chart, with nothing going for him but a willingness to get hit and get back up and line up again. Two years on the practice squad getting killed by the ones. Number thirty-seven his junior year, special teams, then strong safety. By his second year the older guys had a name for him. Steady Eddie. Not because he was fast, and not because he was the most talented man on that field, because he never was. Because he lined up the same way every single rep, hit the same gap, took the same angle, and never once blew his assignment.

Every Monday there was a sheet on the wall outside the equipment room with every man’s name on it and every rep graded, plus or minus, and anybody walking past could read exactly how good you’d been on Saturday.

Nobody in his building has a number next to their name. Including him.

He sets the empty bottle in the trash under the desk slowly, turning it so the glass doesn’t clink.

On the credenza there’s a photo he hasn’t looked at in months. Grace at four, up on his shoulders at a tailgate, both of them mid-laugh. Upstairs, Francis coughs once and settles. The furnace kicks on. Out in the yard the neighbor’s dog barks twice and quits, and the old dog by the back door lifts his head, decides it’s nothing, and lies back down.

His hand is on the light switch when his eye catches the corner of the laptop.

There’s a yellow sticky note stuck to it in Alison’s handwriting. Cig. Tuesday 1pm. Under the name, a phone number.

He doesn’t remember handing it over, doesn’t remember mentioning it at all, but somewhere between the truck and the twins' bath she must have found the torn strip of paper and copied it over before it could get lost in a wash cycle, because that’s what she does with things he drops. He hasn’t asked her what it is. He doesn’t know if Cig is a doctor, a lawyer, or a marriage counselor. He hasn’t peeled it off, and she hasn’t brought it up.

That yellow square is the whole marriage.

He turns off the light. Behind him the yellow square stays stuck to the laptop, right where she put it.

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