Different tools, same fight. Why are you helping me with this? This isn't the fence. He nodded toward the post at the north end, the one still standing where she'd left it. You needed somebody to hold it steady while you check the angle, he said.
That's all I'm doing. Catherine looked at the post for a long moment. She had spent 3 weeks believing she had already lost the company. Standing there in the dark, she understood that she had been standing so close to the rotted section that she'd stopped seeing the 80 feet still holding. And Daniel driving home that night with Noah asleep against the window understood something too.
That the four months he'd spent losing to an insurance company had not been four months of failure. They'd been proof he knew how to fight something bigger than he was. James Whitmore had been waiting for the call. That was the thing that undid Catherine. Not the meeting, which ran 2 hours in a conference room she'd rented because she no longer trusted her own building, but the first 30 seconds of the phone call when he said, "I wondered when you'd get around to me."
She brought revenue. She brought retention curves on the community accounts, 94% against a market average in the '60s. She brought the three-year plan and the modeling on what happened to the pipeline if the long contracts were cut, which was that it looked magnificent for five quarters and then fell off a cliff. Whitmore listened all the way through and asked six questions and then sat back. They want to harvest something they never planted, he said.
He said he'd make calls. He also said on the way out that she was still short and that the people she was short of were the ones who didn't like picking sides. Noah came out to the site most afternoons now because it was easier than the alternative. And by the second week he and Lily had settled into something that neither of them named. They argued about fractions.
Lily said decimals were faster. Noah said fractions were honest. They did homework on the back step. They held the string line when Daniel needed a third hand and complained about it. They split a bag of pretzels in a way that involved counting.
Catherine watched from the kitchen more than she meant to. She noticed that Daniel never told the boy to do something immediately. He'd say what needed doing and then let there be a gap, and Noah would come to it on his own. And if he asked why Daniel answered the actual question in about 11 words and moved on. She had never once in her life let a gap sit like that.
On a Friday, Lily was holding one end of a chalk line and Daniel had the other and she said out of nothing, "You ask Noah before you tell him what to do. Sometimes she wound the string around her finger unwound it. Nobody asks me anything." Daniel stood at at his end of the line with his mouth open to answer and found that he had no answer at all. That evening, Catherine made tea instead of pouring wine and they sat in the kitchen after the kids had gone up.