Chapter Twenty
Juno’s email came in on the morning of Day Forty, subject line possible thing, no promises, call me, which I’d come to recognize as her version of excitement dressed carefully down to nothing, because a woman who’d spent six years editing other people’s stories into a shape that served somebody else’s brief had apparently never fully unlearned the habit of managing her own hope before she let anyone see it.
I called from the gravel lot with a mug of coffee going cold in my other hand, the same place I seemed to take every call that mattered, and she picked up on the first ring.
“Priya Vance,” she said, without preamble, which told me she’d already decided this was worth skipping the warm-up for.
“She runs Ridgeline Unscripted, produces wilderness and adventure-training docuseries, mid-size outfit, good reputation, not the studio, not anyone who’s ever heard the name Calder attached to a bad Q&A clip.
She’s developing a six-episode series on expedition logistics — the actual work, permits, weather-window risk, medevac contingency, the stuff nobody ever puts on camera because nobody thought it would hold an audience until three different true-crime podcasts about search-and-rescue operations blew up their download numbers this year.
She wants a real location with a real, working outfit behind it, not a soundstage dressed to look like one.
I mentioned Marsh Basecamp because I thought of it, not because I sold you to her.
I want to be clear about that part before you get any further into this call. ”
“How’d you two know each other,” I asked, because I’ve never once found it useful to build on a foundation I hadn’t checked myself.
“Worked a shoot together four years ago, before any of this. She’s good.
She doesn’t do favors, and she doesn’t do charity, which I think is the part you actually want to hear.
” A pause, the sound of her flipping something over on her end, a legal pad or a laptop screen.
“I told her the truth, Hollis. That you’d run logistics on four major expeditions, that you’d built and reopened a lodge on your own in six weeks, that you had a certified guide on staff and a provisional permit you were already three-quarters of the way through converting to a full one.
I didn’t mention the marriage. I didn’t need to.
She looked up your name on her own after I said it and called me back an hour later asking whether you’d actually consider it, because — her words — ‘the woman who reads a weather window better than the man everyone’s been paying to climb into one’ was exactly the kind of angle her development slate had been missing. ”
I stood in the gravel lot a long moment, doing the math I do with any number before I let myself feel anything about it. “What’s she proposing, specifically.”
“Six-week shoot in the fall, full exclusive use of the property, you as location and technical consultant on top of the site fee — meaning you’re not just renting her a building, you’re on camera some of the time, running actual logistics for the show’s actual training scenarios, which she’ll pay separately for and which, if I know her slate, becomes the thing critics end up writing about.
Site fee alone’s forty-six thousand, half on signing, half on wrap.
Consultant work’s negotiable, but comparable work runs another twelve to eighteen depending how much of it she wants you doing on camera versus off.
And if the pilot cluster tests well, she wants a multi-year option on the property for future seasons, which is real, ongoing revenue, not a one-time bailout.
” She let that sit a beat. “I want to say the obvious thing before you do the math out loud at me, because I know you’re already doing it: this isn’t Rhys’s money, and it isn’t mine either.
It’s yours. She wants what you already built, priced at what it’s actually worth. That’s the whole pitch.”
I asked her, before we hung up, how the post-production side of her own life was going, because I’d learned by then that Juno’s silences carried weight the same way mine did, and I wanted to give her the chance to fill one if she had something in it.
She was quiet a beat too long for the question to be small.
“I’ve been putting a deck together,” she said, careful, like someone testing a sentence’s weight before committing to saying it out loud a second time.
“Nothing real yet. A pitch. Search-and-rescue crews, the volunteer kind, the ones who go out at two in the morning for strangers and don’t get a chapter title for it.
I don’t know if it goes anywhere. I’ve never pitched anything under my own name before — I’ve always been the person who executes somebody else’s vision competently enough that nobody asks whose vision it actually was.
” A pause. “I wanted you to be the first person I said that to out loud, since you’re the reason I finally understood I was allowed to want it. ”
“Send it to me when it’s ready,” I said. “I mean that as a producer’s note, not a nice thing to say.” She laughed, short and real, the driest sound of approval I’d heard from her yet, and we left it there.
? ? ?
I called Priya Vance myself that afternoon, once the kids were at school and Frankie had the rope wall covered for a group booked through the weekend, and found her exactly as advertised — brisk, specific, uninterested in flattery, the kind of person who asked me three technical questions about medevac contingency budgeting inside the first four minutes that told me, more than any compliment could have, that she’d actually read the material Juno sent rather than taking her word for it.
We talked for forty minutes. I asked harder questions than she’d expected, I could tell, about insurance liability during filming, about crew safety on the training slope, about whether the show’s producers would respect Frankie’s calls on the ground the way a client had to, and she answered every one of them the way I’d have wanted a client to answer mine, without flinching and without pretending she had an answer she didn’t.
By the end of the call we had the shape of a real deal, not a rescue — forty-six thousand for the site, sixteen for my own consulting time across the shoot, a signed letter of intent by Friday with the full contract to follow once her legal team and Elena Kass finished trading language, and a real option, not a vague promise, on a second season the following year.
I found Frankie at the rope wall afterward, coiling a line down for the evening, and told her the shape of it before I told anyone else in town, because a six-week shoot meant six weeks of her schedule too, and I’ve never once believed in handing a person a decision that was partly theirs after I’d already made it for them.
She heard the whole thing through without interrupting, the same unhurried patience she brought to a client’s first clean rappel, and said, when I’d finished, “Camera crew’s going to want me to perform competence for an audience instead of just having it,” which I understood, hearing it, as her own quieter version of the fear I’d carried into that first festival theater seat six weeks earlier.
“I’ll do it anyway,” she said, before I could answer that.
“Your dad taught me the actual work matters more than who’s watching it get done.
Figure a camera doesn’t change that math, whatever it feels like standing in front of one.
” Loralei Finch heard about the contract inside two days, the way she heard about everything, and made a point of telling Simone, who reported it back with something close to satisfaction in her voice, that a documentary crew tramping around Marsh Basecamp for six weeks was going to “run this whole county’s insurance rates up for everybody, thanks to the Marshes as usual” — which I took, on the whole, as confirmation I’d made the right call, since Loralei had never once in five weeks found anything to say about me that wasn’t really about her own numbers.
I sat with the number a long while after we hung up, on the porch, with Simone’s spreadsheet open on my laptop beside me, and did the arithmetic that mattered more than the deal itself: the mortgage refinance and boiler loan shortfall stood, as of that morning, at fifty-two thousand four hundred dollars, down from ninety-one thousand two hundred on Day Fourteen, on the strength of five months of paying groups, a signed retreat contract from Marcus Webb’s firm, and a “Founders’ Circle” membership program Renata had talked half the town into buying into after Nadia’s article ran — thirty-one local families, a hundred and fifty dollars each for a lifetime discounted guiding membership, not charity, an actual product people wanted, but money that had come to me because a town had decided, in its slow and complicated way, to bet on me rather than simply admire the newspaper photograph.
The site fee’s first installment, twenty-three thousand on signing, plus the Founders’ Circle money already banked, plus what the two fall bookings would clear before the shoot even started, closed the gap with room left over for the repair contract Simone had been chasing the county about since Day Fourteen.