He is waiting outside my office building on a Tuesday.
Not Stanley. Not a lawyer. Not a phone call or a message or a carefully managed interaction with distance and legal language between us.
Derek. In person.
With the particular expression of a man who has rehearsed something and is not entirely confident it survived contact with reality.
I stop walking.
"No flowers this time," I say.
"You put the last ones in the conference room," he says. "I heard."
"They were nice flowers," I say. "The conference room deserved them."
He almost smiles. Almost. "Can we walk?" he says. "Just walk. Ten minutes."
I look at him.
He looks back.
There is something different about him today. Not the hospital rawness and not the performance either. Something in between that fee
