Chapter Eleven
Rhys stayed through Day Seventeen without either of us formally deciding he would, the way a weather window sometimes holds longer than the forecast promised and you simply keep using it rather than question your luck, and by Day Eighteen he’d found the porch rail’s actual problem — a rotted post base rather than the loose bracket I’d assumed — and spent the better part of the morning with a borrowed post-hole digger from Frankie’s truck, sweating through a T-shirt in air cold enough to fog when he breathed, doing physical work with his hands in a way I hadn’t watched him do since the training weekend he’d first shown up here at twenty-two with borrowed boots and nothing to lose.
I sat on the porch steps with a mug of coffee going lukewarm, watching him set the new post plumb and tamp gravel around its base with a level of care that told me he’d looked up how to do this properly rather than guessed, and thought, not for the first time that visit, that the parts of him capable of real, unglamorous attention had never once been the problem.
It was always the audience that changed him.
Wyatt came out around ten with a glass of orange juice he’d been sent to deliver and stayed to watch, the way he watched most things lately, cataloguing rather than simply observing, and asked Rhys, with the flat curiosity he’d inherited honestly from somewhere in this family, whether he’d ever built anything before that wasn’t for a camera.
“Once,” Rhys said, tamping gravel, not looking up.
“Your grandfather made me build a lean-to out of deadfall my second week here, no tools but a hatchet, said a man who couldn’t shelter himself for one bad night had no business asking a mountain to let him up it.
Took me four tries. He wouldn’t let it count until it held through an actual storm.
” Wyatt considered this with the real, close attention he gave anything that reframed his father as a person who had once, himself, been bad at something, and went back inside eventually satisfied, and I understood, watching him go, that this was its own kind of repair — a son learning his father’s competence had been built rather than born, the same way I’d once had to learn it about myself.
His phone rang a little before eleven, sitting on the step beside me where he’d left it to keep both hands free, and I saw the name before he did — DEANA OKAFOR, no photo, the flat business-card starkness of a contact he’d never bothered to soften with a picture.
I held it out to him. He wiped his hands on his jeans, looked at the screen, and I watched him make a decision I recognized as new for him, a small one, deliberate: instead of walking off toward the tree line the way he’d taken every studio call I’d ever witnessed in twelve years, he sat down on the step beside me, thumbed the call to speaker, and said, “Hey, Deana. I’ve got Hollis here — mind if she’s on this one?
Might as well have both of us hearing the same version instead of me relaying it after. ”
There was a beat of silence on the line, brief, professional, the sound of someone recalibrating without letting the recalibration show in her voice.
“Sure,” Deana said, crisp, and unbothered on the surface — the flat warmth of an executive who has learned to sound gracious about things she hadn’t planned for.
“Hi, Hollis. Good to finally put a voice to the name.” I said hello, and understood, hearing my own voice go out over that speaker, that I was about to learn something Rhys had not fully thought through the cost of me learning.
“I’ll keep this tight, I know you’re both up in the mountains doing whatever it is people do up there,” Deana said, and The small joke was someone practiced at sounding pleasant while she moved fast toward the actual point.
“Legal needs a final answer on the visual-author language by end of week, Rhys. The board’s meeting Thursday to approve the guarantee structure, and I can’t walk in with an open item on chain of title — not on a number this size. ”
“What’s the exact language again,” Rhys said, and I watched something careful come into his face, a man choosing his words in front of a witness he hadn’t fully prepared for the conversation he was about to have.
“Same as we discussed in Portland. Sole credited director and visual author across all three films, clean insurance chain, no co-authorship claims that could complicate the rights package if any of the underlying footage gets contested down the line — which, given the online chatter after the premiere, legal wants locked tighter than usual, not looser. I want to be straight with you, because you’ve always appreciated straight: the guarantee is four-point-one across the three pictures, contingent on that language holding.
If it doesn’t hold, we’re not talking about the same deal.
We’re talking about a smaller one, probably one picture at a time, probably not at this multiple, and probably not with the marketing spend that makes a multiple like this worth anything to either of us. ”
I sat very still on the step, coffee gone cold in my hand, and did the thing I do with any number large enough to need breaking into pieces before I could hold the whole of it — four-point-one million dollars, across three films, contingent on a clause that required my husband’s name to be the only name on the chain of title for a body of work that included, whether the insurance package acknowledged it or not, nine hundred hours of footage I owned outright.
Rhys heard the number land next to me and didn’t look my way, which told me more than looking would have.
“I need a little more time,” Rhys said. “There’s — some of the sourcing on the archival material is more complicated than it was on the earlier films. I want to make sure whatever we sign actually holds up, not just moves fast.”
“Complicated how,” Deana said, and her voice had sharpened, a half-degree — the attentiveness of someone whose whole job is noticing exactly the kind of hedge Rhys had just offered her.
“Is this about the credit update you pushed through on the digital master? Rhys, that was a cosmetic fix, I signed off on it because it cost us nothing and it’s good press optics given the Q&A clip’s still floating around.
If there’s an actual title dispute buried in the archival footage, that’s a different conversation, and it’s one I need to have now, not after the board’s already approved a number based on assumptions that aren’t true. ”
“There’s no dispute,” Rhys said, too fast, and I felt him glance sideways at me for the first time since the call started, a flicker of a man realizing, in real time, that he’d just said something in front of me he hadn’t fully cleared with himself first. “I just want to make sure everything’s properly documented before we lock a three-picture deal on it. That’s due diligence, not a problem.”
“Due diligence is legal’s job, and legal’s already flagged that the third and fourth pictures draw on a larger archival pool than the first two, sourced partly outside the production’s own logged inventory,” Deana said, and I understood, hearing that, that somewhere in her office a document already existed with language close enough to nine hundred hours in it that she’d have found it herself eventually, with or without Rhys’s help.
“I’ll be straighter than I probably should be on an open line, because I’d rather you hear it from me than from a term sheet.
If there’s a third party with a colorable ownership claim on material this deal depends on, insurance either prices that risk into the guarantee — which drops your number, meaningfully — or requires that party’s signature on a waiver before anything closes.
Either way it’s not a reason to blow up the timeline.
It’s a reason to tell me now, today, exactly what I’m working with, so legal can build the actual document instead of one based on what we’re all hoping is true.
I’m not trying to spook either of you. I’m trying to close a deal that’s genuinely good for you, Rhys — the kind of deal that doesn’t come around twice in a career like yours, and I’d like it to close clean, on the language we’ve already discussed, by Friday. Can you give me that?”
I heard, in a waiver before anything closes, the exact shape of the thing Wade’s four-year-old letter and my own name on a chain of title had apparently been quietly built to prevent — a piece of paper, boring, notarized, filed in a steel drawer on Main Street, that had just become, in real time, on a phone call I hadn’t been invited to until Rhys decided to invite me, the single most valuable document I owned.
Rhys was quiet a beat too long, doing the thing he’d done on this same porch two nights earlier — actually sitting inside a hit instead of reaching for the fastest sentence past it.
“I can give you an answer by Friday,” he said finally.
“I can’t promise you it’s the answer you’re hoping for on the exact language, not until I’ve talked through what ‘sole visual author’ actually requires with the people whose material this partly is.
That’s not me stalling. That’s me not signing something I might have to walk back in six months. ”
There was a pause on the line long enough that I understood, even without seeing her face, that this was not the answer Deana Okafor had expected to receive, from this man, on this call.
“Okay,” she said finally, cooler, more careful, a woman recalculating a forecast in real time.
“Friday. I’ll tell the board we’re finalizing language, not that we’re renegotiating scope, because I don’t think either of us wants that conversation to start before it has to.
Talk soon, Rhys.” A beat. “Nice to meet you, Hollis.” The line went dead before I could decide whether to answer that.
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