Adjustment Clause

So there I was, forty-two years old, six months out of a divorce that had cost me more sleep than money, standing in the lobby of Merrick & Wilde with a coffee in one hand and a laptop bag in the other. The firm had hired my company to audit their settlement claim on the Harry case. Big number. Nine figures big. My boss picked me because I don't get intimidated and I don't get chummy, and honestly, both of those traits were about to get tested.

The office manager met me at the elevator. Addie Bryant, fifty-four, reading glasses on a chain, handshake of a woman who'd been running an office since before I was out of college.

"You must be Ms. Fong. I'm Addie. We've got the conference room set up for you, such as it is."

"Such as it is?"

"Well, the coffee machine's broken. It's been broken since March. Harry won't approve a new one." She shrugged. "Welcome to litigation."

She walked me down a beige hallway to a conference room that was, I swear, barely larger than a generous closet. Banker's boxes everywhere. Four folding tables pushed together. A whiteboard with somebody's lunch order still written on it. This was going to be my office for two weeks.

"Your point of contact is Landon Hastings, our senior paralegal. He's got all the discovery indexed. Fair warning, he's..."

She trailed off, which was interesting.

"He's what?"

"Thorough. He's very thorough." And then she was gone, which told me everything I needed to know.

Landon Hastings showed up twenty minutes late. Thirty-nine years old, tall, sleeves rolled up, tie already loosened, and an expression on his face like I'd personally insulted his mother just by existing. He dropped a box on the table with a thud.

"You're the adjuster?"

"Dakota Fong. And you're late."

"I'm not late. You're early. Harry told you nine and it's nine twenty."

"I was told nine. You were told nine. It's nine twenty."

He checked his watch, and I got the distinct pleasure of watching him realize I was right. "There was a document issue."

"There's always a document issue. That's why I'm here."

He gave me a look. You know the look. The one that says this is my file room and you are a tourist. "The Harry claim isn't a normal audit. Half the damages documentation is in the depository downstairs and half is in electronic discovery, and the indexes don't match. So before you start flagging things as missing, maybe ask whether they're missing."

Oh, he was going to be fun.

"I've done two hundred of these audits. I know how discovery works."

"Two hundred audits and how many nine-figure claims?"

"Three."

"Then you know the difference between auditing a fender bender and auditing this. Where's the Henderson corroboration file? That's the first thing you'll need."

I pulled up my checklist. "It's item fourteen. Send it over."

"It's not item fourteen. It's item nine. Whoever built your checklist used the old index."

I looked at my checklist. Then at him. Then back at the checklist, because I was not going to give him the satisfaction of admitting it out loud, but item nine on the old index was, in fact, the Henderson file, and somebody on my side had transposed it. Great. Wonderful start.

"Fine. Item nine. Doesn't change anything."

"It changes your first three days if you chase item fourteen for three days, which you would have."

I wanted to throw my coffee at him. Unfortunately the coffee was from the broken machine downstairs and tasted like burnt rubber, so even my revenge was subpar.

* * *

Harry Lincoln came by at eleven. Sixty-two, partner, gruff, the kind of man who walks into a room already mid-sentence.

"So you two have met. Good. You're working together. Both of you, in this room, until the claim is settled or the client pulls the case, whichever comes first." He pointed at Landon. "She doesn't get a document unless you know why she wants it." He pointed at me. "He doesn't approve anything. You just have to hear him out."

"That sounds like a system designed by someone who's been burned before," I said.

"Twice. Don't be the third." And he left.

Landon pulled a chair out and sat down across from me with the demeanor of a man reporting for a prison shift. "So. Two weeks."

"Twelve working days. I don't count weekends and neither should you."

"You always this charming?"

"Only when someone's wrong at me before ten a.m."

He snorted, which I chose to interpret as a laugh and he probably chose to interpret as derision. We set up a rhythm anyway, mostly because we had to. He'd pull files, I'd flag them, he'd argue, I'd overrule him or he'd overrule me. He knew every document in that case like it was his own kid. Which, fine, credit where due, the man was good. Annoyingly good. He'd say "page sixty-two, second paragraph, the retention schedule" and he'd be right, every time, and I hated how much I started counting on it.

By noon we'd traded maybe forty barbed comments. Addie brought sandwiches at one and watched us bicker over the deposition summary with the expression of a woman deciding whether to intervene or take notes for later.

"You two are getting along famously," she said.

"We're getting along efficiently," Landon said.

"That's what I said." She left. I'm pretty sure she was smiling.

By four I had a headache and by six I had a rhythm, and by seven Landon had gone home and I was alone in the beige box with the overhead fluorescents humming like a hive. The building empties out around six. I stayed because the Henderson file had a gap. Page sixty-two was referenced but not attached, and I wanted to find it myself, without him, because I am a proud, stubborn, recently divorced woman who does not need a paralegal to find a page.

I found the depository downstairs at seven forty. Cramped. Fluorescent lights half of them dead. Rows of shelving with boxes stacked to the ceiling. I was three rows deep, standing on a step stool I'd found, when I heard footsteps.

"You're going to kill yourself on that stool."

I nearly fell off it anyway, out of pure spite. Landon stood at the end of the aisle with his jacket over his shoulder, and I want you to understand that he was supposed to be home.

"Why are you here?"

"Left my laptop charger. Why are you in my depository?"

"Your depository? It's the firm's depository. I have clearance."

"You have clearance to trip on a step stool in the dark. What are you looking for?"

"Henderson. Page sixty-two. It's referenced but not attached, and you'd know that if you'd stayed past seven."

He set his jacket on a box and walked over, and I mean walked over like he owned the floor tiles. "Row eleven. Bottom shelf. The attachments were misfiled into the Lincoln correspondence carton last year, before my time, and I flagged it in March. It's on the exceptions list you were given."

"The exceptions list I was given had a coffee stain over page three."

He held out a hand to help me down off the stool, and I took it, because the alternative was falling in front of him and that was worse. His hand was warm and I noticed that in a way I immediately filed under not important.

"You look wrecked," he said.

"Wow. Charming."

"I mean it as an observation. You've been at it eleven hours. The gap will still be there at eight a.m."

"So will the deadline."

"It's a document, not a bomb." He pulled the carton out, flipped through maybe twenty folders, and handed me the missing attachment like it was nothing. Which, fine, it probably was nothing to him, but it was my whole evening, and I hated that he made it look easy.

"Thank you," I said, and it cost me something to say it.

"You're welcome. Now go home. I'm serious. Harry will notice if his auditor collapses in the depository and it reflects badly on me."

"Everything reflects badly on you, doesn't it?"

"Only lately." He grabbed his charger off a shelf, and I noticed the little detail of that, that a man who was supposedly gone at six had come back for a charger and then stayed to argue with me for twenty minutes. "Eight a.m.?"

"Nine. You were told nine. You show up at nine twenty."

He laughed. Actually laughed, short and surprised, like it got out before he could stop it. "Eight forty," he said, and left, and I stood there in the half-dark holding a page I'd needed all day, wondering why my chest felt odd, and deciding, firmly, that it was the fluorescent lights.

* * *

Day three started with Addie.

I want you to picture this woman, because I haven't described her right yet. Addie Bryant is fifty-four, runs the whole office like it's a ship she's captain of, wears reading glasses on a chain around her neck and uses them as a pointer when she's annoyed. She came in at eight fifteen with two paper cups and a pastry box balanced on one arm, and she looked at the two of us sitting across the conference table with about six inches of paperwork no-man's-land between us, and she said,

"Coffee. Because the machine's been broken since March and apparently nobody upstairs cares that I've been saying that since March."

"Addie, you're a lifesaver," Landon said, reaching.

"I know. Also, the two of you have been sniping at each other for two days straight and half the firm thinks you hate each other and the other half has a pool going."

My hand stopped halfway to the cup. "A pool going on what, exactly?"

"Wouldn't you like to know," she said, and set the pastry box down between us like it was a peace treaty. "Eat something. Both of you. You're no good to me hungry and cranky."

"We're always cranky," Landon said.

"Yes, but hungry cranky is worse. Harry asked me yesterday if there was a problem with the audit and I said no, they just communicate like two cats in a sack." She took her glasses off the chain and polished them on her sleeve, watching us both over the rims. "Am I wrong?"

"We communicate fine," I said.

"Efficiently," Landon said at the same moment.

And then Addie just looked at us, and the look went on about two seconds too long, and Landon cracked first. He laughed, that same short surprised laugh from the depository, and it got me too, and for about four seconds the two of us were sitting there laughing like idiots over a pastry box while Addie nodded like a scientist confirming a hypothesis.

"There," she said. "Was that so hard? Now eat the danish and stop performing for me, I have payroll to run."

She left and the laugh died out and we sort of looked at each other, awkward again, and I took a danish and he took a danish and we said nothing about the pool.

"Any idea what the pool is?" he asked eventually.

"If you're asking whether I'm betting on it, no."

"If I were asking whether you'd already picked a side?"

"I'd say mind your own wager." I bit into the danish. It was good. Everything in that building was beige except the food.

***

The thing with the email happened at four.

Here's what you need to know about my side of it. My audit software flags duplicate documents. It's a feature. When the same file shows up twice in a production set, the system marks it redundant and the audit protocol says I clear the flag by confirming the duplicate, which in practice means I click a little box that says "remove from review queue." I have done this two hundred times. I have done it on three nine-figure claims. It is the most boring button in my entire profession.

So at four o'clock on day three, the system flagged an email as a duplicate, and I reached for the mouse, and Landon said, "Wait."

Too late. Click.

"What did you just delete?"

"I didn't delete anything. I cleared a duplicate flag. There's a difference."

He was out of his chair so fast it scraped. "Which email?"

"The one flagged as a duplicate. Landon, sit down, it's protocol, the same document appears twice in the production set, so I..."

"That email is not a duplicate." He was standing over me now, and he caught my wrist. Not hard. Not yanking. Just his hand around my wrist, stopping my hand from going anywhere near the keyboard again, and both of us looked at it like it was a small animal that had jumped up on the table.

"Let go of my wrist," I said, and he did, immediately, both hands up.

"Sorry. Sorry. But listen to me. The system flags duplicates by hash value. If the email was forwarded with an attachment stripped, the hash matches but the content doesn't. The attachment lives only in the original. Which one did you clear?"

"The one in the review queue."

"That's the original. Dakota, that's the only copy of the Harry attachment log that exists in the production set. The duplicate is the stripped forward."

I stared at the screen. Then I stared at the recycle queue, where the item sat patiently waiting to be committed, because thank God, thank every boring god of audit protocol, cleared items don't commit until end of session. I hit restore. The email came back. His attachment log came back with it.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. It's back. Nothing was deleted. Breathe."

He sat down slowly. He was flushed, actually flushed, and I realized his hand was still hovering near the table like he wasn't sure what to do with it.

"You thought I was destroying evidence," I said.

"I thought you were deleting a critical email in front of me, yes."

"On purpose?"

"No. Obviously not on purpose. That's why I grabbed you instead of calling Harry."

I let that sit for a second, because there was a lot in it. "You'd call Harry about me?"

"Harry would call the bar association about you. Fong, I've watched two associates get disbarred over production errors. I have a PTSD response to the recycle bin. I'm not proud of the wrist thing."

"The wrist thing was quick," I admitted. "I'd have argued with you for ten minutes before restoring it, and by then the session might've committed. So." I hated the next word. I said it anyway. "Thanks."

"You're welcome." He rubbed his eyes. "God. I've been running on vending machine coffee since seven."

"There's coffee right there. Addie brought it."

"Addie's coffee went cold two hours ago because you and I have been arguing about the Henderson chronology since one."

"We weren't arguing about the chronology at two fifteen. At two fifteen you were arguing that