The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 424

Chapter 424: 424 | Registered Under a Loophole

The room got very still.

"You attached your name to a file you know is wrong," I went on, "and you did it in the one format that makes the wrongness expensive for someone else to raise. That isn’t loyalty and it isn’t sentiment. That’s the best work anyone did in this room today and I’m the only person who’s going to say it out loud, because your mother is going to call you tonight and ask you what you were thinking."

Petra Lang did not cry. I want to be clear about that, because whatever happened to her face was not that. Her eyes went glassy for about a second and a half and then she got it back under management, and the effort of getting it back was more naked than the slip.

"She’ll call at nine," she said. "She always calls at nine on Fridays."

"What are you going to tell her?"

"That her daughter negotiated an observation agreement with her own agency of record and got favorable terms." The words came out steady and then the last three cracked in the middle, and she heard it happen, and her ears went from pink to something closer to arterial. "Which is true."

"It’s true."

"It’s not the whole answer."

"No."

She set the page down on the table. Squared it with the edge, which was the tell, because she squares things when she wants her hands occupied.

"You were supposed to let Fitzgerald run the language." Her voice found its footing again, and with the footing came the edge. "That was the arrangement. You were also supposed to arrive early, which you did, and wear a collar, which you did, and then you spent forty minutes being disarmingly honest at a woman who came here specifically to determine whether you were coached, and it worked, and I hate that it worked."

"You hate that it worked or you hate that I did it without asking you."

"Naturally I hate both. They aren’t mutually exclusive."

"Then say the second one."

"I’m not doing this with you." She came off the window and walked toward the table, heeled boots hitting the floor like punctuation, and she stopped closer than the conversation required. Close enough that I got the botanical cleanser she uses and had to make a decision about my own posture. "You do this. You take a sentence I’ve said and you turn it over and hand it back with the ugly side facing up and then you look at me like you’re waiting for me to thank you for it."

"I’m not waiting for anything."

"You are waiting. That’s the entire technique."

I stood up. Slow, so it read as standing and not as anything else, and she did not step back, which was information.

"Here’s what I actually came up here for." I kept it at conversational volume, because volume is imprecision and because she leans in when I go quiet, and I have known that about her since Building C. "You asked me Wednesday to stop the distance and the tone and the specificity. I said no. I said I’d keep it out of the conference room."

Her breath went shallow. "We’re in the conference room."

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