Chapter Eight
I read it twice, standing at the stove with the kettle going, and understood, the second time through, that a woman who’d flown in from wherever post-production actually happened, rented a car, and driven two and a half hours into a county she had no other reason to visit, did not consider this the small box-checking errand her text implied.
I have written enough logistics emails engineered to sound smaller than they were to recognize the form when someone uses it on me.
I wrote back Noon works, and did not tell her I’d noticed.
“Hollis,” she said, and put out a hand, dry, firm, a climber’s grip that clocked calluses against my own without either of us remarking on it. “Thanks for the window.”
“Come in,” I said. “Coffee’s real, not the instant my father keeps around for emergencies.”
“I’ll take it.” She followed me into the great room, and I watched her eyes go straight to the trestle table, the borrowed monitor, the drives stacked in their labeled case, and register all of it in under two seconds the way you’d register an anchor point before trusting your weight to it.
“You’re running your own edit rig off that. ”
Birdie came through at that exact moment, stuffed fox in one hand, on her way to some errand of her own, and stopped dead at the sight of a stranger the way seven-year-olds do — total stillness, total assessment — before she said, with the same flat directness she’d used on both her parents all month, “Are you the one who climbs with Daddy on the ropes?”
Juno crouched, unhurried, to something closer to Birdie’s height, which I noted, because it wasn’t a gesture she owed a seven-year-old and she gave it anyway. “I am. I’m Juno. I hold the other end of the rope sometimes, so your dad doesn’t fall.”
“Do you like him?” Birdie asked, in the tone of a girl gathering data rather than making conversation, and I watched Juno take the question with real seriousness instead of the practiced deflection an adult might reach for.
“I trust him with my life on a mountain,” Juno said.
“That’s a different thing than the thing you’re actually asking me, and I think you’re old enough that I shouldn’t pretend it isn’t.
I’m not the person to ask about that other thing.
That’s between your mom and your dad.” Birdie considered this with the gravity she gave most adult information, seemed satisfied by its honesty if not its content, and wandered off toward the porch, fox trailing behind her by one ear.
Juno watched her go, then looked at me. “Smart kid. Doesn’t waste a question. ”
“She doesn’t,” I said, and felt something in the exchange settle a degree I hadn’t expected it to settle, watching a woman I’d half-built into a rival answer my daughter’s hardest question without once reaching for something easier to say instead.
“I’m logging, not editing. There’s a difference.”
“There’s less difference than you think,” she said, not unkindly, sitting at the table’s far end without being asked, “once you’ve logged enough hours that you start seeing the cuts before you make them.
I did four years of nothing but logging before anybody let me touch a timeline.
You develop an eye for it whether you mean to or not.
” She said it like a fact she was handing me for free, not a compliment she expected gratitude for, and I filed the distinction, because it told me something about how she operated that I hadn’t gotten from four years of hearing her name invoked by other people.
I poured two coffees and sat across from her, and she got the box unpacked from her bag before either of us had finished the first sip — a printed spreadsheet, a stack of release forms, a laptop she opened but didn’t yet turn toward me.
“Chain of title,” she said, all business, the warmth of the doorway gone the second the work started, which I understood, watching it happen, was not coldness so much as a person switching from one register to a completely different one the way you’d switch from casual conversation to a radio protocol the second conditions changed.
“Deana’s legal wants every frame in the theatrical cut source-verified before the digital master locks.
Standard, boring, insurance-driven — except this time somebody in that office read the credit update Rhys pushed through and asked whether the additional-footage card creates an exposure nobody accounted for at the front end.
Meaning: do you own outright, free and clear, everything credited to you, or is there a licensing question buried somewhere that surfaces after the fact and costs somebody money on the back end. ”
“How much money are we talking about, if the question surfaces late,” I asked, because I’ve never once found it useful to let a vague number sit in a room unpriced.
“Depends how late and how public. A pre-lock title dispute costs legal a few billable hours and an amended form. A post-release dispute, once the digital master’s already sold into a distribution window, costs a lot more than that, and it costs it in a way that shows up in the next deal’s insurance premium too, not just this one.
” She said it the way I’d have priced a medevac contingency, flat, unemotional, a fact rather than a threat.
“I’d rather ask the boring question now than the expensive one in eight months. ”
“I own it,” I said. “Work-for-hire letter from four years ago, notarized, filed with a media attorney in Denver. Every frame I personally shot or logged, mine, clean, no encumbrance. You can have the attorney’s contact information if legal wants to verify it themselves rather than take my word.”
Something in her face shifted, minutely, a recalibration I might have missed if I hadn’t spent twenty years reading exactly that kind of small adjustment in a client’s posture on a rope. “You actually got that documented,” she said. “Four years ago.”
“My father insisted. I thought it was excessive at the time.”
“It wasn’t excessive.” She said it flat, fast, and then, as if she’d let a half-second more honesty through than she’d meant to, pulled it back into procedure.
“It’s going to save legal a headache, is what I mean.
Most people in your position never think to protect that, and then five years later there’s a dispute nobody can resolve cleanly because nobody wrote anything down when it mattered.
” She made a note on her spreadsheet, precise, economical, and I watched her hand move the way I imagine mine looks logging a weather reading — a competence worn smooth by repetition, the kind that no longer requires a person’s full attention and frees the rest of her instead to watch the room.
“How many hours total are we talking about,” she said, not looking up. “On your side. Off the production’s official archive.”
“Nine hundred, roughly. Across all four expeditions.”
She did look up at that. “The production’s official archive has maybe three hundred logged and usable.
I always assumed the gap was just — wastage.
Bad footage, redundant angles, the stuff you shoot and never touch again.
” A pause, careful, the first one she’d let show. “Nine hundred is not wastage.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
I watched her want to ask the next question and choose, visibly, a professional’s discipline, not to.
Instead she said, “I’m not here to relitigate the credit card, for what it’s worth.
That’s between you and Rhys. I’m here because my name’s also on this film’s chain of title, and if there’s an exposure sitting on drives I don’t control, in a county I don’t operate in, I need to know the shape of it before it becomes my problem too.
” She said my problem with a weight I noted and didn’t push on yet, filed next to Wade’s old warning about a floor a boy would never notice was there.
“There’s no exposure to you,” I said. “Everything I own is mine. I’m not trying to blow up your locked cut.”
“Good,” she said, and I believed she meant it, and also understood, watching her, that good had cost her something to say, because a woman who’d flown in on forty minutes’ notice over a box-check email did not relax that fast over one sentence of reassurance from someone she had every professional reason not to fully trust yet.
? ? ?
We walked the property after the paperwork was done, because she asked to see the rope wall — professional curiosity, she said, though I suspected it was also the same instinct that had made her clock the anchor points on the drive in, a person who cannot look at a piece of climbing infrastructure without assessing whether it would hold her — and I watched her run a hand along a line the way Frankie had two days earlier, the exact same gesture, testing rather than admiring.
“Your father trained Rhys here,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“He did. Trained half this town’s climbers, one way or another.”
“I climbed with your father’s student for six years before I ever heard your name said out loud on a shoot,” Juno said, still looking at the rope rather than at me, which I understood, by then, was how she said the things that cost her something.
“I want to say that carefully, because I don’t think it means what it sounds like it means.
I didn’t know there was a whole logistics operation behind every window we climbed inside of.
I assumed — I don’t know what I assumed.
That it happened. That somebody upstream handled it and it wasn’t my job to ask whose hands were actually on it.
” She turned to look at me directly for the first time since the coffee.
“I’ve spent two expeditions trusting my life to numbers I never once asked who was generating.
That’s not a comfortable thing to sit with, once somebody makes you look at it. ”