Chapter Fourteen #2
Another silence, longer this time, and when she spoke again her voice had gone quieter, more careful than clipped now.
“I know a few things I’m not ready to hand you over a phone call, Hollis.
Not because I don’t trust you with them.
Because some of it isn’t only mine to hand over, and I want to do it right, in person, when I’ve actually decided how.
” A pause, and I heard something in it that sounded, for the first time since I’d met her, almost like relief at having said even that much out loud.
“Don’t sign anything yet. That’s the only thing I’ll say plainly today. ”
“I wasn’t planning to,” I said, and we left it there, both of us, I understood, sitting on something the other one hadn’t fully earned the right to yet.
? ? ?
I sat with all of it the rest of the morning, driving the kids to school with the letter’s language running underneath the ordinary logistics of backpacks and a forgotten library book, and understood, pulling into the lodge’s gravel lot afterward, that Elena had handed me the same choice Rhys had been handed on the porch three weeks earlier and failed, partially, to make cleanly: tell the truth now, on my own terms, at a cost I could control, or let it arrive later, on someone else’s terms, at a cost that would very likely be higher and would very likely land on my children first, in a hallway at school, off somebody’s phone.
I called him that afternoon, between a contractor’s final walk-through on the east wing roof — finished, six days ahead of the padded schedule I’d quoted Simone, a small clean win I let myself feel fully for about ninety seconds before the larger day reclaimed my attention — and the drive to pick up Birdie from Mabel’s house for a promised playdate involving the gecko.
“I got a letter from your studio’s outside counsel,” I said, no preamble of my own, because I’d decided somewhere on the drive that the kindest version of this conversation was also the flattest one.
“Kessler Ostrow. They want to license a piece of my footage for the EPK, and they’ve attached a release that asks me to sign away any future claim arising from any of the four expeditions.
Twenty-two thousand dollars. I wanted you to hear it from me before you heard it from Deana. ”
The silence on the line ran longer than I’d expected, long enough that I checked whether the call had dropped before he spoke.
“They went around me,” he said finally, and I heard something in his voice I hadn’t heard before — not hurt, exactly, something closer to the particular vertigo of a man realizing the machine he’d spent twenty-eight years trusting to protect his own story had just, without asking him, gone directly to the one person whose story it had always most needed to manage.
“I didn’t know they’d reached out to you at all. Deana didn’t mention it.”
“Would it have mattered if she had?” I asked, and I wasn’t being unkind, exactly, though I understood, asking it, that it landed close enough to unkind that he’d feel it.
“I don’t know,” he said, and I gave him credit, hearing it, for not reaching immediately for the fluent answer that would have made him sound better than the honest one did.
“I want to say yes. I want to say I’d have told them to go through me first, or not to go at all.
I don’t actually know if that’s true, or if it’s the answer that sounds right on a phone call I didn’t have time to rehearse.
” A pause, and when he spoke again his voice had lost most of the careful varnish it usually carried into a hard conversation. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet either,” I said. “I have a few days. I’m not taking twenty-two thousand dollars to sign away nine hundred hours and every question I might ever have a right to ask, if that’s what you’re actually asking me.”
“That’s not what I’m asking,” he said, too fast, and then, slower, correcting himself in real time the way I’d watched him do more than once on this exact kind of call, “I don’t know what I’m asking.
I think I’m asking whether this is the thing that finally breaks it.
The deal. Us. I don’t know which one I’m more scared of losing, and I hate that I don’t know, and I hate that not knowing is itself an answer to something. ”
I stood in the gravel lot a long moment after we hung up, phone still warm against my ear, the newly finished roofline catching the last of the afternoon light behind me, and understood that I had just watched my husband tell me the truest thing he’d said since the porch three weeks earlier — not a managed sentence, not a credits fix, just a man admitting, out loud, that he didn’t yet know which version of his own life he was more afraid to lose.
It wasn’t comfort. It wasn’t even, strictly, useful.
But it was real, and I had learned, across a month of hard porch conversations, to recognize the difference between a sentence that cost him something and one that didn’t, and this one had cost him plenty.
I picked Birdie up from Mabel’s a little after four, both girls smelling faintly of the gecko’s cedar bedding and triumphant over some small victory involving a mealworm the gecko had finally consented to eat, and drove home turning Juno’s silence over the way I’d once turn over a barometric reading that didn’t quite match the model — not wrong, exactly, but carrying more weight than the numbers alone accounted for.
Some of it isn’t only mine to hand over.
I understood, driving the gravel spur in the day’s last flat gold light, that whatever she was sitting on, it wasn’t a rumor or a guess.
Juno Reyes-Park did not build a career out of imprecision, and she had not, in three sentences on a phone call, given me a single word she hadn’t chosen with the same exactness she’d have given a rope’s fall factor.
I let it sit unpushed. I had learned that much from her already — that some doors open faster for a person who doesn’t lean on them.
Day Twenty-Six. Twenty-two thousand dollars on the table, a release wide enough to swallow every question I hadn’t finished asking, and a husband who, for the first time in this whole long reckoning, had told me he was afraid before he’d told me he had a plan.
I didn’t yet know whether that counted as progress.
I only knew it was new, and that I intended to spend the next few days finding out exactly what nine hundred hours were actually worth to a four-point-one-million-dollar deal, before I let anyone — Kessler Ostrow, Deana Okafor, or my own husband — tell me the number a second time.