11. Serena Locke
Serena Locke
She came on a Thursday afternoon with a folder and no appointment.
Kayla put her head round my office door with an expression of considerable alarm and said, "There's a Serena Locke here?" and I said send her in, and then sat for the eight seconds it took her to walk down my hallway getting my face into order.
She looked tired. That was the first thing.
Six weeks had put something on Serena Locke — a grayness under the excellent haircut, a stiffness in the shoulders — and she came in and took the patient chair on the other side of my little desk and put her hands flat on the folder and said, before anything else:
"Are you all right? Honestly. I've been meaning to come for three weeks and I couldn't work out whether it would be an intrusion."
"I'm fine."
"You're not. I've seen the paper and I know what a rumor does in a town this size, and I want to say plainly: nobody who worked with Preston thinks for one second that you had anything to do with it.
" She said it firmly, warmly, and it went into me like a needle into a numb gum — I felt the pressure and not the point.
"It's obscene. What happened at the Chamber was two professionals disagreeing in public, and God knows I've done worse. "
"Serena, I'm so sorry about Preston."
And she looked at the desk, and her face did something complicated, and she said, "Thank you. It's been —" and stopped, and let the sentence go unfinished, and I sat there watching a woman be moved and thought: *she's good.*
That's not hindsight. I want to be exact. That is precisely what I thought, in the moment, in my own office, and then I was ashamed of thinking it, because a woman whose business partner has been killed is allowed to not finish a sentence.
"We're closing the practice," she said.
"What?"
"For now. Not permanently — there's no version where that building stays dark, the lease alone is—" She waved it off.
"We've suspended clinical operations. Both associates are on paid leave.
There's an insurance audit, which is routine after a death, and there's the police, and frankly there's a business that was built on a man's face and the face is gone.
" She looked up. "Which is what I'm here about. I'd like to buy your practice."
The air conditioner ticked.
"I'm sorry?"
"Santa Barbara Smiles. The practice, the goodwill, the charts, and the building if you want to sell it, and if you don't want to sell the building we lease it from you at a good rate for ten years.
" She opened the folder and turned it around and slid it across the desk, and it was a term sheet, and it was typed, and it had numbers on it.
"You stay on as clinical director at a salary.
You keep your staff — all of them, that's in there, your hygienist and the associate and the front desk, I've listed them by name.
You do dentistry and I do the calendar and the billing and the insurance and you never look at a loan statement again. "
I looked at the number.
I want to be honest about this part, because it's the part I've never told Nate and told Tess only once.
I looked at that number and for about four seconds — four real seconds, the kind you can count — I felt something in my chest go loose with relief.
Eleven years of bank note, gone. Payroll, gone.
The red pen on Marisol's printout, gone.
Serena Locke watched me look at it and did not say one word, because she is extremely good at what she does.
"Why?" I said.
"Because it's a well-run practice in a great location with a doctor people trust and it's currently, forgive me, worth about forty percent of what it was in July, and I'm a business, Lila.
" A small self-aware smile. "That's the honest answer and I'd rather give you the honest answer.
The kinder answer is also true: I have a building across the street that may never reopen and a team I'd like to keep employed and a town that has just decided it doesn't trust corporate dentistry, and there is exactly one practice in this zip code that everybody trusts. "
"You want the trust."
"I want the trust," she agreed. "I'd be an idiot not to."
I turned the page. And on the second page, in the ordinary place where such things sit, was a mutual nondisclosure and non-disparagement clause, four paragraphs, entirely standard in form, covering "all information relating to the Practice, the Purchaser, its affiliates, and their respective clinical, billing, and administrative practices," in perpetuity.
"What's this?"
"Boilerplate," said Serena Locke. "Every deal has one."
"It says clinical and billing practices. Of the purchaser. In perpetuity."
"It says both parties, in both directions. It protects you as much as me — Lila, you'd be selling me your patient list, I'd be signing away my right to say anything about your chart notes for the rest of my life." She tilted her head. "Is that a problem?"
And here is the moment, and I've had a long time to look at it.
There was a locked drawer forty feet from where we were sitting with twenty-three names in it and a legal pad in Marisol's handwriting and a stack of signed releases.
There was a woman across the desk from me who had come in the week her business partner died, with a tired face and a generous number and a clause four paragraphs long, having waited exactly long enough for me to be frightened.
She did not know what was in the drawer. I was almost certain she did not know what was in the drawer.
But she knew I'd done second opinions on a Saturday. I'd told her myself, in front of a hundred and forty people, with a live microphone.
"It's not a problem," I said. "It's a lot to read. Can I take a week?"
"Take two." She stood, and did not push it, and did not touch the folder again — she left it on my desk, which is a very good trick, because a folder on your desk is a conversation that hasn't ended. At the door she paused. "Lila. One thing, and then I'll go. The second opinions."
Everything in me stopped.
"I want you to keep doing them," said Serena Locke.
"...Sorry?"
"I mean it. If something went wrong in that building — and I am increasingly afraid that something did — then I want to know what, and I would ten thousand times rather it came from you than from an auditor in Sacramento.
" She had her hand on the door frame. "Whatever you find, bring it to me first. Not because you owe me anything.
Because I'm the only person in this who can actually fix it.
" A tired, decent, completely convincing smile.
"Preston was a good man and I let him spend two years being a face on a banner, and if there's a bill for that I'd like to pay it myself. "
She left.
I sat in my office for about ten minutes without moving. Then I got up, and went out to the front, and stood at the reception desk where Marisol was pretending to do the schedule.
"Well?" said Marisol.
"She wants to buy the practice," I said.
"She wants me to keep doing the second opinions and bring her everything I find first. She's given me two weeks and a nondisclosure that would gag me about her billing practices for the rest of my life.
" I put the folder down on the desk. "Marisol.
She just asked me, very kindly, to hand her the evidence and sign something that means I can never talk about it. "
Marisol looked at the folder for a long moment.
"Lock the drawer," she said.
"It's locked."
"Lock it better."