Chapter Three
Saturday he woke me up with coffee and a plan.
“No phones,” he said. “I’m serious. Mine’s in the drawer. Yours goes in the drawer. We are going to the place with the bad pancakes and then we are going to the water and then I’m going to fall asleep on you during a movie you picked.”
He put his phone in the drawer.
He actually put it in the drawer.
That’s the thing I need you to understand. He wasn’t managing me. There was no second where he glanced at the door or checked a reflection. He ate two of my pancakes off my plate with his fork and told me a story I’d heard nine times and told it better. He held my hand in the parking lot for no reason, swinging it, like we were twenty-two.
I laughed in the right places. I asked follow-up questions. My body did something new all day — a small cold pulse under the ribs, four or five times an hour, like a phone vibrating in a coat you’re not wearing.
At the water he sat down on the wall and squinted at the boats and said, “I’ve been a ghost for a month. I know. I’m sorry.”
“You’ve been busy.”
“I’ve been protecting something.” He said it looking straight out. “You’ll see. Just — don’t let me be a ghost for another one. Pull me back if I do it again.”
“Okay.”
“Say it.”
“I’ll pull you back.”
He nodded like something had been closed and filed, and put his arm around me, and I let it stay there for a long time.
That was the worst hour of the whole thing, and nobody died in it.
—
At four he was in the shower and I stood in the kitchen with the drawer open, looking at his phone, not touching it.
I didn’t need his phone.
I needed page nine.
—
Christian met me in a parking structure because I asked for somewhere with no windows and no people. He came with a folder and put it on the hood of his car and didn’t open it.
“On Thursday you told me to stop,” he said. “I’m going to finish the sentence now.”
“Finish it.”
“The reallocation on page nine has a footnote. Little roman numeral. It points to Exhibit C.” He opened the folder. “Exhibit C is a one-page consent. A share reallocation of that size can’t happen without the holder agreeing to it in writing.”
“I never agreed to anything.”
“I know.” He turned the page around so it faced me. “That’s what I want you to look at.”
Consent of Holder. Six lines of text. A signature block at the bottom.
Charlize A. Taylor.
My name. My loop on the C. The little gap I leave between the L and the I because I’ve always written it too fast.
“No,” I said.
“Yes.”
“No, because — look at it, that’s not—” I had my finger on the page and my finger was moving. “That’s mine. That’s my hand. That’s exactly my hand.”
“It’s very good,” Christian said. “It’s traced. Look at the pressure. It doesn’t change anywhere. Real signatures speed up and slow down.”
The concrete had that smell parking structures have. Wet dust. I remember thinking about the smell for a while.
“Someone traced my name,” I said.
“Someone traced your name, and a notary stamped it, and it went into a data room in front of nine lawyers, and I read it and I initialed the index and I went home and had dinner.” He said that part evenly. He didn’t ask me to feel anything about it. “There’s a date and a notary seal. September fourth. Eleven forty in the morning.”
“September fourth.”
“Yes.”
I laughed. One syllable. It came out wrong.
“I was on a stage.”
He went still.
“Eleven forty on the fourth I was on a stage in Austin doing the keynote. Four hundred people. It’s on the internet. There’s a clock in the corner of the livestream because the sponsor put one there.” My hands were shaking now and I let them. “I didn’t sign anything at eleven forty. I was telling four hundred people about database sharding.”
“Say that again.”
“There’s a *clock in the corner*.”
Christian took his glasses off and pressed his thumb and finger into his eyes and stood there like that for three full seconds.
“Then it isn’t a business dispute anymore,” he said. “It’s a crime, and I can prove the date, and I know exactly which of them will fold first.”
“Which one?”
“The notary. It’s always the notary.” He put the glasses back on. “They get four hundred dollars. They don’t get a lawyer.”
—
“Why are you doing this?”
He closed the folder. He took his time.
“Rothwell has run this eleven times that I know about. Founder gets bought, founder gets moved off the cap table, founder signs an NDA and disappears into a consulting agreement and never says a word.” He looked at the ramp. “I drafted nine of them.”
“Nine.”
“Nine.” A pause. “The seventh one was somebody I knew.”
“Who?”
“Not tonight.”
He said it flat, no wound in it, and got in his car.
—
Sunday he made eggs.
He sang. He’s a bad singer and he knows it and he does it louder because of that. He fixed the drawer under the sink that’s been broken since May, on his knees, with the wrong screwdriver, talking to it.
At eight he came and sat on the arm of the couch and put his hand on the back of my neck, warm, the way he’s done since we were kids.
“So Monday,” he said.
“Monday.”
“Board thing at nine. Northlight.” He shrugged. “It’s the restructuring stuff, it’s dry, Vivian’s going to talk for forty minutes about governance and I’m going to want to die. There’s a couple of docs at the end. Signature pages, admin. Bring a pen, they never have pens.”
“What am I signing?”
“Cleanup.” His thumb moved once on my neck. “Honestly, Liz, it’s boring. It’s the kind of thing where if I explained it you’d fall asleep on me and then I’d have to carry you to bed, and my back’s bad.”
I turned my face up toward him.
He kissed my forehead. Not my mouth.
“Weekend’s not over till midnight,” he said, and stood up, and stretched, and yawned so wide it cracked. “Except I’m dead. I’m so dead. Come to bed and let me be useless next to you.”
He fell asleep in four minutes.
I lay there with my eyes open and watched the ceiling take the shape of the streetlight.
At eleven-fifty my phone went once on the nightstand.
Calendar update. *Project Northlight — agenda revised.*
I opened it.
Four items.
1. Approval of prior minutes.
2. Northlight — closing conditions.
3. Notary attestations — Exhibit C.
4. Resignation of C. Taylor, Chief Technology Officer — acceptance and effective date.
Item four already had an attachment. Two pages. Signed.
I checked the file’s history the way you do when your hands are shaking and you want a machine to do the feeling for you.
Created eleven days ago.
Author: M. Hale.
Beside me, Marcus rolled over in his sleep, found my arm, and held it.
They’d written my goodbye eleven days before they asked for it. Someone had put my name on it in my own handwriting. And at nine in the morning I was going to sit at that table and listen to forty minutes of governance, and then a man would read out item three, and then item four, and everyone in the room would turn and look at me and wait for me to be gracious.
Nine hours.
I lay there in the dark next to my best friend and practiced my face.