Not quite a smile, but the shape of one considering whether to happen. "What do you want, Ms. Whitmore?" he asked. "To understand you," she said. "Most people when something is offered to them, they find a reason to say yes.
You find a reason to say no. I want to know where that comes from. He was quiet for a moment, turning his coffee cup in his hands. It doesn't come from anywhere complicated, he said finally. I just know the difference between an offer and a condition.
Most people don't. And you think my offers come with conditions? Everything comes with conditions, he said. The question is whether you can see them before you sign. Natalie looked at him not the way she looked at people in meetings, cataloging their weaknesses and tracking their angles, but actually looked the way she had mostly stopped doing somewhere in the last decade.
What if I told you I wasn't offering you anything? She said, "What if I just wanted to have lunch?" He studied her for a long moment. Then he finished coffee. "Then I'd say the pastrami here is better than anything in your expense account," he said. And you're welcome to find out for yourself." It was the first time she had laughed, genuinely laughed, in front of another person in longer than she could easily remember.
They met three more times over the following two weeks. Once for coffee, once for a walk along the waterfront that neither of them had technically planned. Once in the parking garage of a building where he was finishing a service call, and she happened to be leaving a meeting. A 15-minute conversation standing next to her car that lasted 40 minutes before either of them noticed. He was not trying to impress her.
That was the thing she kept returning to. Grant Holloway was always performing, always angled toward her, always shaping what he said to land in a particular way. Ethan simply talked. He had opinions about things and stated them without first calculating how she would receive them. He disagreed with her twice in the span of one conversation about infrastructure planning and did not soften either position when she pushed back.
He asked her questions nobody asked her. Not about Orleans's growth strategy or her thoughts on the commercial real estate market, but things like, "What did you want to be when you were 12? And do you actually like the hotels or do you like building them?" She had to think about the second one for a moment. Both," she said finally. "But building them more." "That makes sense," he said.
"The finished thing is just evidence. The building is the actual work." She thought about that for a long time afterward. Before the fourth meeting, Ethan said something directly that she suspected he had been holding back. "I want to be clear about something," he said. They were standing outside the sandwich shop, the October wind pulling at her hair.