Chapter Nineteen
MICAH
She invited me in on a Friday evening.
Not to a meeting. Not to a planned neutral venue. She texted me at four in the afternoon and said: Are you free tonight. I need to talk to someone who isn't Dean or Isaac about something and you're the obvious choice for reasons that are both obvious and annoying.
I almost smiled. I'm free. Your terms.
My apartment. Seven. Bring something to eat because I forgot to grocery shop.
I brought Thai food and stood in her doorway at exactly seven because showing up early to Avery Yates's apartment felt categorically wrong in the way that late would also have been wrong.
She let me in without ceremony and took the bag and said "bless you" in the tone of someone who'd been staring at an empty fridge for two hours, and then we were sitting at her kitchen table with takeout containers and it was the most normal thing that had happened to me in months.
"The board leaked Dean's heat information," she said.
"I know. Isaac told me he addressed it."
"He told me too." She was using chopsticks with the efficiency of someone who'd decided which utensil was correct and committed to it. "I want to know what it means for my position. Specifically."
I set down my own chopsticks. "It means they're willing to use private information as leverage. Which tells us this is already an adversarial filing, not a cooperative one."
"Which means if I do decide to pursue recognition, it's going to be a fight."
"Yes."
She nodded. Not surprised. Just confirming what she'd already calculated.
"I want to know something else," she said.
"Tell me."
"That night. The first night." She was looking at her food, not at me. "When you woke up and I was gone. What did you feel?"
The question was different from the question in Marin's office. In Marin's office it had been: Is this your actual position or the framework you've been operating inside? This was something more specific. More vulnerable.
"I felt the specific wrongness of math that doesn't add up," I said. "The absence read as an error. Not a neutral outcome."
"That's a very Micah way to say that you cared."
"It is."
She looked up.
"I'm working on the vocabulary," I said.
Something shifted in her face. That small thing she did where the control relaxed by a fraction and let something through underneath. "The succession document. If I weren't legally complicated. If I were just — a woman you'd spent a night with. What would you have done?"
"I would have been awake when you left," I said. "I would have asked you to stay for coffee."
"That's very domestic of you."
"I make good coffee."
She almost laughed. The almost-laugh was better than the real one would have been, somehow — it showed up in her eyes before it got all the way to her face, and that sequence of it was something I filed away.
"I'm scared," she said. Without preamble.
"I know."
"Not of you specifically. Of the whole—" She gestured vaguely at the space between us. "The whole thing. The pack and the legal fight and the part where I let myself believe this is real and then something happens and I become a personal capacity again."
"It's not going to happen."
"You can't guarantee that."
"No." I kept my eyes on her. "I can't guarantee the law. I can guarantee what I want. And what I want is for you to be in this — officially, publicly, in every legal document that goes out of Price-Kent Holdings with a partner designation — or I don't file the succession at all."
She stared at me.
"That's not a negotiating position," I said. "That's what I want."
"That's—" She stopped. "That would blow up the succession deal."
"Then it would blow up."
"Micah."
"Avery." I kept my voice even. "I've been running a company since I was twenty-six years old and I know the difference between things that matter and things that feel like they matter.
The succession deal matters. The board's specific configuration of the succession deal does not matter more than this. "
She looked at me for a long time.
"Your rut," she said. "Is it close right now?"
"Closer than usual," I said honestly. "It's been close since you walked in. Being near you does something specific to the regulation and I'm managing it but I don't want to pretend it isn't happening."
"I know." She exhaled. "I feel it. I can tell."
"Does that bother you?"
"No." She said it after a moment, like she'd checked and was reporting the result. "It doesn't bother me. What bothers me is not knowing if the rut is why you're saying things like the succession deal doesn't matter more than this."
"The rut is not why." I made sure she could hear the certainty in it. "The rut is managed. What I said came from somewhere else."
She was very still for a moment.
Then she reached across the kitchen table and touched my hand.
Not the way she'd touched Micah's hand at the couch — that had been impulse, something she'd probably have analyzed afterward. This was deliberate. A choice.
"Okay," she said.
"What does that mean."
"It means I believe you." She pulled her hand back. "And I'm going to think about what to do with that."
We ate the rest of the Thai food and talked about nothing important — her client, a piece of legislation Dean was fighting, whether the building's heating system was going to make it through winter — and under all of it was the specific warmth of two people who'd said the true thing and were now just sitting in the fact of it.
When he left at ten, I stood in my doorway and watched him go and thought: stay.
I didn't say it. Not yet.
But I thought it.
* * *
* * *