She said to Daniel, "The code is on the box." She drove away.
Richard stood in the driveway. Daniel kept loading tools.
Richard looked at him with the expression of a man recalibrating. You're just the contractor, Richard said slowly testing.
That's right, Daniel said. How long have you been working here?
3 days. You seem Richard paused.
Comfortable here. Daniel lifted the toolbox into the truck bed.
Good fence work takes time, he said. You don't rush it.
Richard looked at the fence at the gate at the clean, straight line of it running along the property edge. She have you doing other work?
He said beyond the fence. Daniel closed the truck bed.
He looked at Richard directly. Not aggressively, just directly.
I'm done here, he said. Have a good day.
He got in the truck. He could feel Richard watching him as he backed out and he let himself be watched because he had nothing to hide and nothing to prove.
And there was something in having nothing to prove that was its own kind of power. He pulled onto the street and drove.
His phone rang at 1:47. "Catherine, the first shareholder meeting is set," she said without preamble.
"Tuesday at 8, James Whitmore. He was the second person to ever write me a check.
He picked up on the second ring." "Good," Daniel said.
He said he'd been waiting for me to call. Her voice had something in it that hadn't been there before. not quite restored, but moving in that direction.
He said he had questions about the board's proposal, and no one had asked him what he thought. "People always have questions," Daniel said.
"Most of the time, no one asks. I spent the morning pulling together the documentation," she said.
"Revenue trajectory, client retention, three-year plan, the programs that the board wants to cut. "It's..."
She stopped. "It's a stronger story than I remembered.
I'd been so close to the crisis that I forgot what the whole thing actually looked like. That happens, he said.
You get close enough to something and you start seeing what's damaged and forget to look at what's holding. A pause.
Are you going to keep doing that? She said, "What?
Saying things that apply to more than one situation at a time." He almost smiled.
Occupational habit. He said she was quiet for a moment.
The gate, she said. It swings perfectly now.
It should, he said. The old hinges had about another season in them, maybe less.
You could have just replaced them on day one. She said, "You waited until the fence was done.
Sequence matters." He said, "You set the structure first, then you address the points of entry."