Chapter Twenty-Four — Nora
Kale brought my proposal to the table on a Thursday.
I wasn't in the chapel. That wasn't how the table worked and I understood that now the same way I understood most things about the compound, which was by watching it operate long enough to see the patterns.
Wade told me afterward. Unanimous, he said. Same as the referral vote.
I looked at him. Same as the referral.
He said: The table doesn't take those votes lightly.
I know, I said.
He said: When it's unanimous it means the table is certain. No reservations. No conditions.
I held that.
I said: When do I start.
He said: When you want to. Darren has the access protocols ready.
I looked at the meeting room where I'd been sitting for six weeks, first as an investigator and then as a consulting expert and now as something else, a person who had a professional relationship with the compound that was separate from and alongside the personal one.
Two different things that happened to share a location.
I'd had that arrangement before. It had gone badly before.
This was different. I knew it was different. The record said so and the numbers said so and I had been checking both for six weeks and they were consistent.
I said: Tomorrow.
He nodded.
I started the next morning.
Darren walked me through the compound's financial architecture over two hours at the meeting room table, the same table where I'd first looked at the Vallo Basin records six weeks ago.
His system was as clean and organized as everything else he did, and I moved through it with the ease of someone who understood the underlying structure because she'd built something like it herself.
At the end of the two hours I said: You have a gap in the quarterly reconciliation process. It's not a vulnerability right now but it could become one if the operating income grows.
He looked at where I was pointing on the screen. Then he said: Correct. I flagged that eight months ago and haven't had the bandwidth to address it.
I can address it, I said. I'll have a proposal for the reconciliation structure by end of week.
He nodded. That's useful.
It was the most enthusiasm Darren expressed about anything, and I had learned to read it correctly.
The Sacramento client work started the following week.
I drove up on a Tuesday morning for the first in-person meeting.
Two hours up, two hours back, four hours of work in between.
The partner I worked with, a careful man named Reyes who had been in private equity for twenty years and had the specific skepticism of someone who had seen financial irregularities from multiple angles, walked me through the engagement parameters and I asked the questions I needed to ask and by the end of the meeting he looked at me with the expression people used when they'd been reassured about something they'd been uncertain about.
He said: You come recommended by the federal oversight board. That's not a usual referral source for independent forensic work.
Olsen, I said. He was the examiner on the task force review.
He nodded. I looked at that case, he said. You built something significant there.
I followed the numbers, I said. That's what I do.
He smiled slightly. He's going to be a good client.
I drove back to the compound on the valley road in the early afternoon and pulled into the lot and sat for a moment before getting out, the way I had on the first day, except different. On the first day I'd been cataloguing what I saw through the windshield. Now I was just arriving somewhere.
Wade was coming out of the workshop when I got out of the car. He looked at my face and said: How'd it go.
Good client, I said. The engagement is real work. Complex. Exactly what I'm good at.
He nodded. Good.
We went inside and Garrett had something going on the stove and Rook came to meet me at the door, which was what Rook did now when I came in. Not the formal assessment nose-touch he'd done on day one. Just coming to the door because I was coming through it.
I put my hand on his head.
He walked with me to the kitchen and lay down under the table.
Garrett looked at me from the stove. Food's at six, he said.
I know, I said. Thank you.
He went back to his work and I sat at the kitchen table and opened my laptop and started on the reconciliation proposal I'd promised Darren, and the compound went about its afternoon around me, and I thought: I have a client in Sacramento and a client in the compound and two more clients who send me work remotely and I am sitting at a kitchen table in the Central Valley doing the work I'm good at.
This was a life.
It was a specific, real, chosen life.
I had not had one of those in three years.
That weekend Katy came to find me on the south step on Saturday morning with two cups of coffee and the expression she used when she had something to say and had already decided she was going to say it.
She sat down and handed me a cup.
I have a question, she said.
Go ahead.
She looked at the valley. Are you happy, she said.
I looked at her.
Not content, she said. Not okay. Happy. The actual thing.
I thought about that the way I'd learned to think about things here, without the pre-formulated answer, without the performance of the response.
Yes, I said. I think that's what this is.
She nodded. Good. She drank her coffee. Cole was the same way when he got here. He didn't know what to do with it at first. The happiness. It felt like something he had to justify.
I looked at the valley. I know that feeling.
You don't have to justify it, she said. You followed the numbers. The numbers said stay. You stayed. That's a complete and sufficient set of reasons.
I looked at her. Those are the professional reasons.
She looked at me. Are there other reasons.
I held my coffee. Yes.
She nodded. Those count more.
I know.
She looked at the workshop where we could hear Devlin's crew starting the morning work. She said: Can I say something that might be out of line.
Go ahead.
She said: Wade has been here for eighteen months doing everything right and never being certain when it was going to be recognized and never making that into something that required managing around.
He just did the work. She paused. He deserves someone who does the same thing.
Who shows up every day and does the work without making it a performance.
I looked at her.
She said: That's what you do. I've watched you for six weeks. You show up and you do the work and you don't make it into something it isn't.
I held my coffee.
I'm not being sentimental, she said. I'm being accurate.
I know, I said. That's why it lands.
She nodded and stood and took her empty cup back inside, and I sat on the south step in the morning light and thought about showing up and doing the work and not making it into something it wasn't, and I thought: that is exactly what I intend to do.
Every day.
For as long as it goes.