Page 2 of His Wall

She wrote something small in the notebook. I watched her pen move. Maybe I was losing my mind. Maybe I had shoved the keyboard in myself.

"Your morning, Mr. Cross." She held the notebook at a clean angle and read from memory, not from the page. "You have a meeting with the partners this morning. A call with Halverson at noon. Lunch with Mr. Hale at 1:00 p.m. has been adjusted to dinner per his message this morning. Meeting with the Klein team at 2:00 p.m. in the small conference room. 4:00 p.m. is open and will remain so."

"Good. Sit down, let's run Whitfield before Halverson."

"Of course."

She took the chair across from me, opened a slim folder I hadn't noticed her carrying, laid it flat on the edge of my desk, and turned it so the pages faced me.

The coffee was still on the leaning stack. I pushed it aside.

"I'll move that." She reached for the cup at the same moment I did.

Her fingers brushed the back of my hand. She lifted the coffee to the corner of the desk and set it down on the coaster I had never once used. Her pen was already back at the margin of the page.

My hand stayed where it was. Warm.

"Whitfield," she said. "The CFO came back overnight. She's holding on to the escrow structure, but she's moved on to the earn-out. She'll take twenty-two months if you give her the acceleration clause on a change of control. Paragraph two, page three."

She turned the page. The pen moved to the next line before her hand had finished.

"She dropped the noncompete radius from seventy-five miles to fifty. She's asking for indemnification parity. She's also added a representation on the customer contracts that wasn't in the first draft."

Her mouth was bare. No lipstick. A soft, full lower lip, the upper one a little narrower, the color of the inside of a shell. It moved around the word indemnification, and I lost the back half of the sentence somewhere in the shape of it.

"Sorry — say that again."

"She's added a representation on the customer contracts."

"Right. Right."

I looked down at the page and made myself read the line she was reading. The pen tip was resting a quarter-inch to the left of a number I was supposed to care about, and her fingernail was just long enough to catch the edge of the paper. I was watching her fingernail instead of the number.

"Mr. Cross."

"Yeah?"

"The earn-out structure on page three. Twenty-two months, with acceleration on a change of control."

"Run that by me once more."

She did. Evenly, without a flicker. She did not sigh. She did not tilt her head. She read the clause again from the top, and I tried — I genuinely tried — to track the acceleration. Her words came out even for a moment, and I was gone again.

I rubbed the back of my neck and sat forward.

"Okay. I've got it. Keep going."

"Of course." She walked me through the customer-contract representation, and halfway down page four, she turned the page, and her pen stopped in the middle of a dense paragraph.

"You'll want to look at section four-B before the call." Flat. No small pleased note. She might have been telling me the time.

I pulled the page toward me. Read it.

Buried six clauses deep in boilerplate on successor liability, the sentence transferred the obligation to cure defaults from the buyer to one of their subsidiaries. I had read this draft twice last night and walked right past it.

I looked up. "Where did you learn to read contracts, Claire?"

She lifted her eyes from the page. "It's in the brief, Mr. Cross."