Chapter Eighteen
Thursday was Day Thirty-Four, and the call was set for eleven in the morning, which gave me exactly enough time to get the kids to school, run the borrowed monitor’s cables one more time to make sure the great room’s ancient wiring wouldn’t drop the connection mid-sentence, and stand a moment alone at the trestle table doing the inventory I’d stopped letting myself do before hard days, because I understood, setting up a laptop where a rough cut of eleven minutes and forty seconds had once played to an empty room, that whatever this call turned out to be, I no longer needed the inventory to know what I was walking into.
I already knew. Nine hundred hours, still mine.
A document with two women’s names shrunk in the same paragraph.
A husband who had told the truth three days late and was about to find out whether three days late was late enough to matter.
“You ready,” I asked him, not unkindly, because I had decided, sometime in the last two days, that I no longer had the appetite to make this harder than it needed to be simply because he’d made every version of it before this one harder than it needed to be.
“No,” he said, flatly, and I gave him credit for the honesty of it, even as some colder part of me noted that a month ago he’d have said yes and meant it as a performance he was hoping to grow into by the time anyone tested it.
“Thanks for making this work on short notice,” Deana said, brisk, the crisp warmth I remembered from the porch call three weeks earlier, though I heard, underneath it now, something tighter, a woman managing a conversation she hadn’t fully scoped before walking into it.
“I’ve got the board at two, so I want to use this time well.
Rhys, Hollis — good to see you properly this time, even like this.
Juno, I didn’t expect you, but I’m glad you’re here. Saves me a second call.”
“I asked to be included,” Juno said, even, unhurried. “There’s material in this conversation that’s mine to speak to directly. I didn’t want it relayed secondhand.”
“Understood.” Deana’s eyes moved across the screen, cataloguing, the same four-second assessment I’d watched Juno give the property on her first visit, a person reading a room for information before committing to a position in it.
“Rhys told me Monday that the archival footage question isn’t a hypothetical — that there’s a real ownership claim, documented, on a significant portion of the material this deal depends on.
I want to start there, because it’s the piece legal needs resolved before anything else on the table matters.
Hollis, is that an accurate characterization of your position? ”
“It is,” I said, and heard my own voice come out in the flat, even register I’d have used briefing a client on a weather window, because I had learned, across a month of hard conversations, that this register served me better than any other one I owned.
“Nine hundred hours, shot and logged by me across four expeditions, work-for-hire assignment notarized four years ago, filed with counsel in Denver, copies available to your legal team on request. I’m not disputing your ability to use the footage that’s already properly licensed to the production.
I’m telling you the archive is considerably larger than what’s currently accounted for in your chain of title, and I intend for that to be reflected accurately, in writing, before any of it gets used in anything else. ”
“What does ‘accurately’ mean, in concrete terms,” Deana said, and I heard, in the question, the particular precision of a woman who has learned never to let a vague word sit unpriced in a negotiation, the same instinct I’d built my own career on, aimed now directly at me.
I slid the legal pad’s contents across, the same three terms Juno and I had built over two days, and watched Deana read them off her own screen once Juno shared the document, her expression giving away nothing beyond the small, practiced stillness of an executive absorbing a number she hadn’t chosen herself.
“A structured licensing agreement for the full archive, priced at market rate for comparable expedition documentary footage. A credit restoring archival and footage contribution to my name across existing and future releases. And Juno’s producer credit restored in full, contractually, across all three pictures in the guarantee.
” I let that sit a beat. “None of it requires Rhys to stop being the credited director. None of it requires the sole-visual-author language to disappear from wherever your insurance actually needs it for chain-of-title purposes. It requires the credit and the compensation to reflect who actually made the survival, and the film about it, possible — which, as it happens, was never only him.”
“I’ve seen the underwriting memo,” Juno said, before Deana could answer, and I watched her set the second document on the shared screen without waiting to be invited, the same email I’d read at this exact table four days earlier, R.
Feld’s flat institutional language filling the frame.
“I assume you have too, since you’re on the distribution list. I want to say plainly, on this call, with my own name attached to it: the decision to restructure my producer credit to coordinating producer, and to remove Hollis’s footage credit entirely, were made in the same email, by the same person, on the same afternoon, for the same underwriting rationale.
That’s not two unfortunate accidents. That’s a documented pattern, and I’m not willing to keep absorbing my half of it quietly while everyone treats hers as the only one that’s real. ”
Deana was quiet a moment, and I watched her do something I hadn’t expected — not deny it, not deflect, but sit with it, a flat stillness, an executive recalculating a position in real time rather than performing composure over a gap she hadn’t yet closed.
“I’m not going to pretend I didn’t see that memo,” she said finally, and her voice had lost some of its brisk warmth, gone plainer, more careful.
“I approved the underwriting recommendation. I want to be straight with both of you about that, because you’ll respect the straightness more than you’d respect me pretending otherwise.
It wasn’t personal. It was risk management on a guarantee structure that predates either of your specific situations — the same clause has trimmed credits on deals that had nothing to do with either of you, before and since.
That doesn’t make it right. It makes it the machine doing what the machine’s built to do, which is treat any name that isn’t the single insured author as exposure rather than as a person.
” She paused. “I can’t promise you I’ll fix the machine on this call.
I can tell you I’m listening, and I can tell you the number you’re proposing is going to require real conversations with underwriting that weren’t on today’s agenda. ”
“Then let’s have the real conversation,” I said. “What does the number actually cost, if you do it properly instead of cheaply?”
“Restructuring the archival license at market rate, done right, probably runs six figures — considerably more than Kessler Ostrow offered you, considerably less than rebuilding this deal from scratch over a title dispute nobody resolved cleanly. Restoring Juno’s credit costs less in dollars and more in precedent.
Every deal this size gets negotiated against the last one.
” She looked directly at the camera, at all three of us at once as far as the geometry of a video call allowed.
“I don’t think either of you has said the actual choice to him straight enough for it to land yet. ”
Rhys’s jaw tightened, the only part of him that moved.
“The board meets at two,” Deana went on.
“I walk in with a deal that holds the current language — clean, fast, four-point-one, closing this quarter — or I walk in and tell them the language changes, which means a smaller number, a longer timeline, and no promise they don’t just walk away from the whole guarantee rather than deal with a public complication before the ink’s dry.
I’m not telling you which to choose. I’m telling you there isn’t a version where you get the clean fast deal and the accurate credit both.
There’s only a version where you decide, out loud, on this call, which one actually matters more — and live with what it costs. ”
I watched Rhys hear that, and I watched him do the thing I had watched him do on four porches across a month — go still, absorb the hit rather than reach immediately past it — and for one full beat I let myself believe, watching the stillness hold a half-second longer than it usually did, that this was the moment he’d finally clear the bar every version before this one had fallen short of.
“Can we find a middle version,” he said instead, and I felt something in me go quiet and cold in a way that had nothing to do with the great room’s temperature, because I recognized the sentence before he’d finished it, the exact shape of every managed compromise he’d offered across four weeks, dressed this time in the clothes of a reasonable question.
“What if the credit restoration happens, formally, but on a slightly longer timeline — after the guarantee closes, so it doesn’t complicate the underwriting conversation today?
I could commit to it in writing, now, on this call, a real contractual promise with a date attached, so it’s not just a gesture.
But if we try to force it into the language before the board meets, we’re gambling the whole thing on a conversation that might not go our way, and I don’t —” He stopped, visibly hearing himself, and pushed forward anyway, which was almost worse than if he hadn’t noticed at all.
“I don’t think either of you actually wants to blow up four-point-one million dollars over sequencing. ”