Chapter Seventeen
Juno came back Day Thirty-Two with a rented laptop bag over one shoulder instead of the small pack, and told me, setting up at the far end of the trestle table with the brisk efficiency of someone who had clearly slept on a plan overnight and arrived ready to execute it, that she’d taken two days off a locked schedule she wasn’t supposed to be able to take days off of, and that we had, by her count, roughly a week before Deana’s board meeting forced the sole-author language into its final form whether anyone liked the shape of it or not.
“I told my post supervisor I had a family emergency,” she said, not quite meeting my eyes, setting the laptop down with more care than the gesture required.
“Which isn’t strictly a lie, depending how you define family. ”
We worked through the morning the way I’d once have built a permit packet — starting with the hard constraint and working outward from it, rather than starting with the outcome we wanted and hoping the facts would bend to fit it.
The hard constraint was simple to state and considerably harder to solve: Deana’s guarantee structure required a single credited visual author for insurance purposes, a real, defensible business need that predated any of this and wasn’t going away because two women had finally compared notes on a memo.
What we wanted was not to blow that structure up out of spite, Juno was clear about that from the first hour, but to force it to hold a truer shape — proper producer credit restored for her, proper archival and footage credit restored for me, in writing, contractually, not as a courtesy that could be quietly reclassified the next time an underwriter got nervous, and a license for my footage priced at what it was actually worth rather than what a firm like Kessler Ostrow had bet a stressed woman without counsel might sign for.
“The insurance problem’s real,” Juno said, pulling up a spreadsheet I hadn’t expected her to have ready, rows of figures that looked, at a glance, uncomfortably like the medevac contingency tables I’d built a hundred times myself.
“I’ve watched three deals this size structure around exactly this issue without erasing anybody.
You can have a sole director-of-record for chain-of-title purposes and still contractually guarantee named credit and compensation to a co-author whose material the film depends on — it’s not even unusual, it’s just paperwork nobody wanted to spend the afternoon drafting properly when the lazy version was sitting right there.
I’ve seen the templates. I know which entertainment attorneys in this specific niche actually understand how to build one instead of just citing boilerplate.
” She glanced up. “Your Denver attorney. Elena Kass. I looked her up after you mentioned her name on the phone. She’s good — better than good, actually, for a solo practice.
I think she and I should talk directly, today, before any of us talks to Deana again. ”
By late morning we had the shape of it written out on a legal pad in my own handwriting, because some part of me still trusted a pen and paper to hold a plan more honestly than a screen, three terms stacked in the order I’d have prioritized any negotiation I’d ever run for a client: first, full contractual producer credit restored to Juno across the digital release and all three pictures in the guarantee, not a courtesy title but the real one, with the compensation and awards eligibility that came attached to it; second, a properly licensed, properly compensated archival footage agreement in my name — not the narrow EPK slice Kessler Ostrow had offered, but a structured deal covering the full nine hundred hours, priced against comparable archival licensing rates Juno had pulled from three deals she’d worked on herself, a number that made twenty-two thousand dollars look, in her flat assessment, “like a rounding error somebody hoped I wouldn’t notice”; and third, a properly worded credit restoring the archival and footage contribution to my own name on all existing and future releases, structured so that Rhys could still stand as the sole credited director and on-camera author for insurance purposes without that structure requiring either of our names to disappear from the record of who had actually made the survival, and the film about it, possible.
“None of this blows up his deal,” Juno said, tapping the third line with two fingers, the same testing gesture she used on a rope.
“It makes his deal true. Those aren’t the same thing as the studio’s been treating them, but they’re not actually in conflict either, once somebody bothers to draft it properly instead of reaching for the cheap version. ”
“You did homework on my own lawyer,” I said, not quite a question, something close to admiration in it that I let show.
“I do homework on everyone I’m about to trust with something this size,” she said, flat, unbothered by the observation. “You’d have done the same in my position. I’d have been disappointed in you if you hadn’t.”
I watched her work for the better part of an hour after that, on the phone with Elena, the two of them building something in real time that I recognized, listening to the shorthand pass between them, as two competent professionals discovering, with the relief of people who’ve spent too long working alone, that the other one didn’t need anything explained twice — a rhythm I hadn’t realized I’d missed until I was sitting across a table watching two other women fall into it, because it was the exact rhythm Frankie and I had built on a rope wall three weeks earlier, the shorthand of people who’d learned the same trade and trusted each other’s calls without needing them justified in the moment.
? ? ?
Wyatt came home a little after three and stood at Juno’s shoulder the way he’d once stood at mine on Day Eight, watching a spreadsheet scroll instead of a timeline, and asked, with the flat curiosity that had apparently become his default register for anything involving adults doing serious work at the trestle table, whether she was fixing the movie too.
“Something like that,” Juno said, not looking up from the screen, which I noted, because it was exactly how I’d have answered him myself — not dismissive, just honest about the limits of what a ten-year-old needed explained mid-task.
“Your mom found something the movie left out. I’m helping make sure it doesn’t get left out again. ”
“Good,” Wyatt said, with the flat, unearned authority of a boy who has decided an adult’s project has his blessing, and went to find a snack, and Juno watched him go with the same unguarded expression she’d worn watching Birdie two days earlier, something in it that looked, for just a moment, like a woman doing arithmetic on a life she’d built differently than the one currently sitting in front of her.
We broke for lunch a little after one, and I found myself, over sandwiches neither of us had planned properly, telling her about the tent recording — the six minutes from Day Eight, the raw, unperformed shape of Rhys’s fear the night before the rope failure, the sentence about his father that had never made it into any film.
I hadn’t planned to tell her. It came out the way the truest things usually did with me, sideways, in service of a smaller point I’d been making about what the re-cut footage would actually contain if the licensing terms ever let it see daylight, and I watched her go very still, the particular stillness of a person receiving something they hadn’t expected to be handed.
“I climbed two expeditions beside that man,” she said, when I’d finished, quiet now, all the brisk procedural energy gone out of her voice.
“I heard some version of that fear on the mountain, more than once, never that specific, never with his father’s name attached to it out loud.
I always assumed he just didn’t talk about it. ”
She turned her coffee mug a quarter turn and didn’t drink from it.
“He did talk about it. Just never to anyone who was ever going to put it in a film.” She was quiet a moment longer. “That’s not just a credit dispute anymore, is it.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
“That’s the whole thing,” I said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to say since Day Eight, without ever quite landing on the sentence for it until you just said it for me.”
? ? ?
Rhys’s car came up the gravel spur a little before four, unannounced, and I understood, watching Juno’s posture change beside me — not guarded, exactly, but recalibrated, a woman deciding in real time how much of the afternoon’s work she was willing to let him see — that this was not a visit either of us had planned for.
He got out slowly, the hesitance of a man who has clocked, from the driveway, that a rented laptop bag and a second car in the lot meant a conversation was already in progress that hadn’t waited for him.
He stood in the doorway a moment, taking in the two of us at the trestle table, spreadsheets and a printed page I hadn’t put away and Elena Kass’s voice still faintly audible through Juno’s phone on speaker before she muted it, and I watched him understand, in real time, something I hadn’t fully articulated to myself until I saw it land on his face: that the two women he’d spent a month managing separately, in separate conversations, on separate porches, had simply stopped waiting for him to broker a version of this that worked for everyone, and had built one without him.
“I didn’t know you were up here,” he said to Juno, and I heard, in the flatness of it, something closer to the raw register from the porch three weeks earlier than the rehearsed one, a man too caught off guard to reach for his usual cadence in time.