The room was someone else's idea. A neutral space, the mediation service called it, which Ade understood to mean a space in which neither of them had the advantage of familiarity. It had a table and two chairs and a window with a view of a parking structure. It was adequately neutral.
Ade had arrived first. She had asked to arrive first. She wanted to be in the chair when Coll walked in, not standing when he appeared in the doorway.
He was seventeen minutes late. She had not expected punctuality. She had expected, if anything, for him to be early, to arrive before her, which would have been a kind of move. His being late was either inconsiderate or also a kind of move. She found she didn't know which one she believed.
He was older than she remembered. This was unremarkable. It had been seventeen years.
He sat down and said: I wasn't sure you'd come.
She said: I wasn't sure either.
What he had was something she needed. This was the difficult truth she had been sitting with for four months, since she'd learned he was teaching it. She had looked for another way to get it, other people who held the same knowledge, other ways to acquire what she needed, and had found that the knowledge was his specifically, that it was connected to the work he had done and the access he had developed over decades, and that she could proceed without it or she could sit in this room.
He had written a paper, seventeen years ago, that had ended her first significant professional effort. It was methodologically correct and entirely without mercy. She had spent a year understanding that his paper was right.
He opened his notes.
She had not yet decided whether she was going to receive anything today.