Season Two · Part Three · Episode 17 of 24
The plan on paper finally has a phone call attached to it.
Jason had made roughly four hundred calls to Marion Vance over thirty years, and not one of them had been as hard to dial as this one.
Calloway Freight’s general counsel answered on the first ring, as she always did, because Marion Vance treated a ringing phone the same way she treated everything else, as something to be handled immediately and correctly. “Jason,” she said. “Tell me nothing’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Jason said. “I want to add someone to our regular call next week. Robert Hayes. He’s been with the firm for eleven years in commercial litigation, and he’s going to start sitting in on Calloway matters more regularly.”
There was a pause on the line, brief but not nothing. “Are you stepping back from us?” Marion asked, with no cushion around it.
◆
Jason had rehearsed an answer to that exact question three times that morning, in the car, in the elevator, and once more while standing at his own window, and every version had sounded slightly off to his own ears before he’d finished saying it out loud.
“Not stepping back,” he said, settling on the plainest version he had. “Building forward. You’ve had one person answer the phone for this firm for thirty years, and if I were hit by a bus tomorrow, Calloway would spend six months explaining your history to whoever the firm handed you to next. I don’t want that for you. Robert’s going to know your file the way I do, starting now, while I’m still here to make sure he learns it right.”
Marion was quiet for a moment. “That’s a more honest answer than I expected,” she said. “Most firms wait until the partner’s already gone, then apologize for the gap. All right. Bring him next week. I’ll want fifteen minutes alone with him before the call so I can decide for myself.”
“That’s fair,” Jason said, meaning it, and felt something in his chest loosen slightly, something he hadn’t fully realized had been tight.
◆
He told Robert that evening, in his office, with the door closed, the way doors had been closing all year for conversations that mattered.
“Marion Vance,” Jason said. “Calloway Freight. It’s my biggest litigation relationship, and it’s yours to start learning next Tuesday. She wants fifteen minutes alone with you first. Consider that the real interview. Everything after that is just work.”
Robert didn’t say anything for a moment, and Jason recognized the stillness, because he’d worn the same expression himself, a long time ago, the first week anyone told him he was ready for something he didn’t feel ready for.
“I’ve read the file twice already,” Robert said at last. “I still don’t know what she’s going to ask me.”
“Neither do I,” Jason said. “That’s what the fifteen minutes is for. She’s not testing what you know. She’s testing whether she can trust you the way she trusts me, and that’s not something either of us can hand you. You’re going to have to earn that yourself, starting Tuesday, the same way I did thirty years ago with someone else’s client before Calloway was ever mine.”
◆
The call itself, the following week, ran forty minutes, fifteen of which Jason spent in the hallway outside his conference room, checking his phone and not reading anything on it.
When Marion’s assistant finally waved him back in, Robert was in the middle of a sentence, walking Marion through a filing deadline with the kind of specific, unhurried competence that came from having read every page of the file rather than skimming for the parts that mattered. Marion was nodding. Jason let himself exhale before opening the door.
“He’ll do,” Marion said afterward, directly to Jason, with Robert still in the room to hear. “I still expect to see your name on the file, Jason. Not just your name. Not anymore.”
◆
Afterward, alone in the elevator, Jason thought about Marcus’s slideshow, the one nobody had thought to update because nobody had known there’d be a reason to. He thought about the three million dollars that had walked out with him because not one client on his list had ever heard a name other than his own.
Robert’s name was now on Calloway’s file, next to Jason’s, not instead of it. It was one relationship out of twenty-two, one name on a page that still had far too many blanks, and it had taken thirty years of trust and five months of deliberate work to make it happen honestly, in a single phone call that Marion Vance could have ended in the first ninety seconds if she hadn’t liked what she heard.
One of twenty-two. Jason had spent five months not looking at that page. He looked at it on the way down.
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