Xu Lihua was nodding, slowly, at the numbers on her pad. Tang Min was already murmuring a translation of the escrow point to Feng, whose eyes had not left Gabi.
"It could work," the tired lawyer said, surprising himself. "If — if both principals agree by early afternoon, we could paper it by—"
"By midnight," Feng said. "If we begin now. If no one wastes the day protecting his pride instead of his project."
Everyone understood who he meant. No one looked at Harcourt, which was its own kind of looking.
Harcourt stood with his hands flat on the table, a man who had spent forty years making rooms wait for him, discovering that this room, on this day, would not. His jaw worked. His lawyers studied their pens. The clock above the door — an ordinary office clock, black hands, white face — ticked into the silence with insulting calm.
Gabi closed her notebook and waited, because what had to happen next could not be drafted, translated, or delegated, and everyone at that table knew it: if the fix was going to save Halsted Yards, Bill Harcourt would first have to swallow his pride, turn to the waitress he had tried to shame, and ask her — properly, as one professional asks another — for her help.
Chapter 14 — An Apology, of Sorts
He asked her into the smaller office at the end of the hall, because men like Bill Harcourt did not lose arguments in front of witnesses if a door could be found.
Gabi Mensah went, because she had nothing to fear from a door. The office had the same river view as the conference room, diminished to a single window. Rain she had not noticed starting stippled the glass. Somewhere below, the lunch service at a dozen restaurants was beginning without her, and the thought came with an unexpected pang: by now Karen Doyle would be running the pre-shift briefing at the Silver Heron, and Oscar would be aligning the glasses at Table Twelve by touch, the way he always did.
"Sit," Harcourt said, and then, catching himself, added, "please," in the tone of a man laying down a tool he had never held before. "Miss Mensah. Sit, please."
She sat. She did not fold her hands or soften herself. Her mother had taught languages at a kitchen table, but she had taught posture there too. Walk in like the table was set for you.
Harcourt did not sit. He went to the window and addressed the river for the first part of it, which Gabi understood was the only way the words were going to leave his mouth at all.
"I have built things in this city for forty years," he said. "Buildings with my name in the lobby stone. I have been — I am not a man who is accustomed to being corrected by..." He stopped. Started again. "What happened at dinner. At your table. I was showing off for Feng and his people. That's the truth of it and it's not a proud one. I'd had a difficult quarter, the deal was slipping, and you were — you were there, with a water pitcher, and I thought a hundred thousand dollars was a cheap laugh and a cheaper lesson. I was wrong about the price, as it happens." A dry sound that was almost a laugh. "I was wrong about more than the price."
He turned around. His face was older in the gray light than it had been under the River Room's chandeliers.
"I'm sorry," he said. "For the bet. For how I spoke to you in front of those people. It was — my late wife would have called it common, and she'd have been right, and she was never wrong about that category of thing." He drew a breath that visibly cost him. "And for this morning. You brought me a problem I didn't want with a solution attached, and I called it revenge because it was easier than calling it what it was. Help. So. Miss Mensah. I am asking you, properly. Will you help me fix this deal before midnight?"
It was a clumsy apology. It arrived with a detour through his reputation and his dead wife, and it spent almost as long excusing the man as it did addressing the woman he had wronged. Gabi, who had spent years at fine-dining tables listening to powerful people negotiate with their own consciences, recognized it for exactly what it was: the best a proud sixty-three-year-old could do on a first attempt, and, to her own surprise, not nothing. He had said the words. He had said them to her face, with no audience to perform for and no laugh to hide behind.
"Thank you," she said. "I accept the apology, Mr. Harcourt. And I'll help. But not the way I helped at Table Twelve — which is to say, for your entertainment, on your terms, inside your evening. If I work on Halsted Yards today, I work the way the lawyers in that room work. So before we go back in there, you need to hear my price, and it's not only money."
Something in his expression braced. "Name it."
"First: respect, in writing. A consulting engagement letter, signed today, naming me as language and deal consultant to this transaction — my full name, Gabrielle Mensah, my actual qualifications. DePaul University, International Business studies; Mandarin interpretation; document review in both languages. Not 'waitress.' Not 'server who speaks Chinese.' If this deal closes, the paper will say who found the clause and who drafted the fix, and if your firm issues so much as a paragraph about this signing, it will not erase me from it."
"Done," he said, too quickly.
"I'm not finished," Gabi said, evenly, and watched him learn, in real time, to let her finish. "Second: a consulting fee. Separate from the bet — that money was won, not earned, and I'm not trading it back. My fee is the market rate for specialist bilingual deal consulting on a transaction of this size, for the three days already worked and for today, and your tired lawyer out there can confirm the range so neither of us has to haggle like it's a fish market. It will be in the engagement letter, payable on closing, and it will also cover the future. If your group wants me to review the translated closing set — and Mr. Feng's team has already said they do — that is a retained arrangement, at a retained rate, with hours I set around my family. My father is recovering from a broken hip, Mr. Harcourt. His therapy schedule is not negotiable, and it will never again be something I fit a billionaire's emergency around without a contract that respects it."
"Anything else?" he asked. To his credit, there was more weariness in it than sarcasm.