Chapter Fifteen
Rhys called on the morning of Day Twenty-Eight to say he was flying in that afternoon, unscheduled, no press tour excuse this time, no Deana call he could point to as the reason, and I understood, hearing the flatness under his voice, that whatever had prompted the trip had not been his own idea.
I was right. He told me as much within about ninety seconds of getting out of the rental car, before he’d even properly hugged the kids, in the specific rushed way of a man who has rehearsed a sentence on a plane and needs to say it before his nerve catches up with the rehearsal.
“Deana called me yesterday,” he said, low, once the kids had run off toward the gear shed to find Frankie, who’d promised Wyatt a proper knot lesson that afternoon.
“She knows about the Kessler Ostrow letter. She knows you haven’t signed it.
She’s — I want to tell you this the way she said it, not softened, because you’ll hear the softened version as a lie the second you find out the real one.
” He exhaled, and I watched him reach, visibly, for the register he uses to deliver hard news gently, and then, to his credit, set it back down.
“She said the board’s already nervous about the online chatter from the premiere.
She said a public dispute over footage rights, on top of that, right before the guarantee gets finalized, reads to insurance underwriters like exactly the kind of exposure that makes a four-point-one number quietly become a two-point-nine number, or worse, become a conversation that drags into next year instead of closing this quarter.
She asked me to talk to you. Her words: ‘see if there’s a way to manage this quietly, before it needs lawyers on both sides instead of just yours. ’”
“Manage this quietly,” I repeated, and heard my own voice go flat and even in the register I use for a client who has just told me something I’d already priced into the worst-case model, which did not make it land any softer, only more precisely.
“I know how that sounds.”
“Do you,” I said. “Because I don’t think you do, Rhys, or you wouldn’t have gotten on a plane to say it to my face instead of texting me the sentence and letting me be angry at a screen instead of a person you’d have to actually watch hear it.”
? ? ?
We didn’t have the rest of that conversation on the porch.
Frankie had Wyatt and Birdie both occupied at the rope wall by then, coiling and recoiling practice cord with the same absorbed concentration Wyatt had brought to it since the first week, and Rhys and I ended up in the kitchen instead, over coffee neither of us drank, the trestle table’s usual chaos of contractor invoices and Simone’s projections pushed to one side to make room for a conversation I understood, watching him arrange his hands around the mug the way a man arranges evidence he’s about to present, he had come prepared to have.
“I’m not asking you to sign the release,” he said, careful, the words coming out in the shape of something he’d built in advance and was now laying down piece by piece.
“I want to be clear about that. I told Deana I wasn’t going to pressure you into anything you didn’t want.
What I am asking — what I told her I’d at least raise with you — is whether there’s a version of this where you take a real number, a bigger number than twenty-two thousand, in exchange for a narrower ask.
Not a full release. Just an agreement to keep the footage question private while the deal closes.
No public comment, no press, nothing that gives the board a reason to get cold feet before the ink’s dry.
Once it closes, once the money’s real and the pressure’s off, we renegotiate the credit question properly, together, with you having actual leverage instead of a ticking clock working against you. ”
I sat with that a long moment, turning the mug in my hands the way I’d once turn a mug on a different porch, three weeks and a lifetime ago, and understood, hearing it laid out in full, exactly what he’d built: not a betrayal, not a demand, something worse in its way, because it wore the shape of a compromise he genuinely believed was fair.
“Say the quiet part,” I said. “The part under the part you just said.”
“What quiet part.”
“You’re asking me to disappear again,” I said, “on a slightly better payment schedule than last time. You’re asking me to take money to stay invisible until it’s convenient for the deal that requires my invisibility to close, and then trust that once the four-point-one million dollars is safely in the bank, the same studio that just paid me to be quiet is suddenly going to feel motivated to make noise about crediting me properly.
Rhys. Think about the actual sequence you’re describing.
Why would they ever do the second part once they’ve already gotten the first part for a fixed price? ”
He was quiet, and I watched him do the thing he’d gotten better at over the last month, sitting inside a hit instead of reaching immediately past it — except this time, watching more closely than I had on any of the porches before this one, I understood that the stillness wasn’t him absorbing the truth of what I’d said.
It was him searching for the sentence that would let him keep the plan mostly intact anyway.
“I don’t think it’s that cynical,” he said finally.
“I think Deana’s under real pressure from her own board, and I think if the deal closes clean, she has every incentive to keep me happy long-term, which means keeping you happy, because she’s smart enough to know this isn’t going away just because a signature makes it quiet for a quarter. ”
“That’s not an incentive structure,” I said. “That’s a hope you’re choosing to call a strategy because the alternative requires you to actually spend something real, right now, instead of asking me to spend it for you.”
“What am I supposed to do,” he said, and for the first time since he’d gotten out of the car, his voice lost the careful shape entirely, came out raw, faster than he’d meant it to.
“Tell Deana no, walk away from four-point-one million dollars, on the strength of a fight I’m not even sure I’d win, and gamble our kids’ entire future on a principle, when there’s a version — a real version, Hollis, not a fantasy — where everybody gets most of what they want if we’re just patient for a few more months? ”
“You’re asking the wrong question,” I said, and heard my own voice go colder than I’d meant it to, colder than I usually let it go with him even at the worst of this.
“The question isn’t whether you walk away from four-point-one million dollars.
Nobody’s asking you to do that today. The question is whether you go back to Deana and tell her the truth — that the chain of title has a real gap in it, that it’s your wife’s, that it isn’t going away, and that if the deal requires erasing that fact, the deal is built on a lie you’re not willing to keep telling.
That’s the whole ask, Rhys. It costs you an uncomfortable phone call and maybe a renegotiated number.
It does not cost you the deal. It costs you the version of the deal that requires me to disappear, which was never actually yours to offer in the first place, because it was never actually true. ”
“And if she comes back and says the number’s gone, or the deal’s gone entirely, because the language has to hold or the insurance doesn’t work?”
“Then you’ll know,” I said, “for the first time in this whole negotiation, what the deal was actually worth to them without me in it. Right now you don’t know that, because you’ve never once made them say it to your face.
You’ve let them assume the erasure was free, because you never once told them the price. ”
? ? ?
He didn’t have an answer for that, not a real one, and I watched him retreat instead into the version of himself I’d hoped, after the porch post and the honest silences of the last month, he’d started to leave behind — not cruel, not even dishonest exactly, just smaller than the moment required, reaching for a compromise position because a compromise position let him avoid choosing between two things he wanted and couldn’t have both of.
“Let me think about how to say it to her,” he said, which I recognized, hearing it, as the exact shape of I’ll think about it differently next time from three weeks earlier, dressed in slightly better clothes.
“I’m not saying no to what you’re asking.
I’m saying I need to figure out how to say it in a way that doesn’t blow the whole thing up before I’ve even tried the version where it doesn’t have to. ”
“That’s not thinking about how to say it,” I said.
“That’s managing it. Again. You flew up here to ask me to manage it quietly on your behalf, and when I told you no, your very next move was to manage how you’re going to tell Deana no, instead of just telling her.
You’re not choosing between the deal and me, Rhys.
You’re choosing, over and over, between doing the hard thing today and doing the hard thing eventually, and you keep landing on eventually, and I am done being patient with eventually.
I have been patient with eventually for twelve years. ”
“That’s not fair,” he said, and I watched something crack in his voice that wasn’t performance, a real, frightened thread running under the words.
“I flew up here. I told you the truth about what she asked, instead of just doing it quietly behind your back, which I could have. That has to count for something.”