Season Two · Part Three · Episode 22 of 24
Jason decides how this ends before anyone else can decide it for him.
Jason had eleven months left in the partnership year in which he turned sixty-five, a fact he had known for exactly as long as everyone else in his life, and had somehow never once said out loud in this building.
He said it out loud now, to Susan, Renee, and Margaret, in the same conference room where a slideshow had once played for an audience that had no idea it was watching the beginning of anything. “I’m not waiting for someone to ask me what my plan is,” he said. “Marcus never got asked, and by the time anyone thought to ask, there was nothing left to plan. I’m not doing that. This is my last year as the only name on anything I bring in. Starting today, anything new comes in paired from the first meeting, and by the end of the year everything that’s already mine is either closed out or has a second name on it, someone who’ll still be here in twenty years.”
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Renee studied him for a long moment. “That’s not a small thing to say in a room with a compensation committee down the hall,” she said. “Your number alone moves the partnership’s entire projections.”
“I know exactly what my number does to the projections,” Jason said. “I built the spreadsheet. That’s the point. I’d rather the firm plan around a known date than be surprised by an unknown one, the way it was with Marcus.”
Susan hadn’t said anything yet. When she did, her voice carried less of the careful distance she usually kept in rooms like this. “You called me back here because you didn’t know what the answer looked like,” she said. “This is what it looks like. I didn’t design this ending. You just built it.”
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He told Tom Reyes and the compensation committee the next morning, formally, on the record, so that nobody would hear it secondhand. Then he spent the better part of that week the way he’d spent the week after Susan’s first call, alone with the same spreadsheet, except this time he wasn’t staring at a column of blanks, wondering where to begin. He already knew where to begin. He had eleven months and twenty rows, and for the first time since he’d built the file, the numbers didn’t frighten him. They read like a schedule.
He set two more in motion that week, both filed through the quarterly slate, two names against the written criteria for each, the way the rule required. He caught himself reaching for the first name that came to mind on both, and made himself write the second one down before deciding anything. Ferris Manufacturing, which he’d represented for nineteen years, went to Sarah Lindqvist, a sixth-year corporate associate whose contract work Jason had quietly trusted for two consecutive renewal cycles, though he never told her. Whitlock Health Systems, his largest client, went to Nadia Brooks, a seventh-year senior associate he’d watched in the same quiet way.
Eighteen rows left. He wrote the number down instead of dreading it, which, in the doing, felt like a small victory of its own.
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His daughter called that Sunday, as she did most Sundays, and asked, out of habit rather than genuine curiosity, how work was going.
“I told the partnership I’m winding down,” Jason said, hearing himself say it out loud for the second time that week, easier this time than the first. “Eleven months. I’m not disappearing. I’m just not going to be the only name on anything by the time I actually go.”
There was a pause on the line, warmer than Renee’s had been. “Are you okay?” his daughter asked, not the question he’d expected.
“Better than I’ve been in years,” Jason said, and as he spoke, he realized it was true. “I spent thirty years being the only person a room needed. I didn’t know how much it was costing me until I started giving pieces of it away.”
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Back at the office the following week, he passed the small conference room and saw Anna through the glass, alone with a first-year associate, writing on a legal pad, letter by letter. From the doorway, it looked exactly like the fresh page Susan had once turned to the day she’d first spelled PRIME out for him and Renee. He didn’t go in. He didn’t need to.
Marcus had left behind a slideshow nobody had thought to update. Jason went back to his office and opened the spreadsheet he had built alone that first night. Eighteen rows. He typed the date eleven months out at the top of it, where he would see it, and went home.
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