What I find is not standard.
Six properties. Atlas's clients. In the storm event three years ago, the adjuster handling the Silver Ridge portfolio issued settlements between forty and sixty percent of accurate claim value. Across six properties. That's not variance.
I'm still building the comparison spreadsheet when I hear Atlas in the lobby.
I come out and show him. He looks at the screen and then at me, and I watch something move through his face — recognition, and under it the old reflex, the one I've seen before:what does she want from this, what's the angle.
He sees me see it.
"I'm sorry," he says. "That was wrong."
"Yes," I say. "It was."
"I have a reflex," he says. "It's not accurate. It's just practiced."
"I had one too," I say. "About contractors who inflate claims. I knew you hadn't by the second site visit. The reflex was there first anyway." I look at him across the table. "So we're both carrying old damage."
"Apparently." He pulls out the chair across from me and sits down. "Do you want to build this case?"
We spend the afternoon on it with my documentation, his property knowledge. By five o'clock it's raining and we're almost through the sixth file and the lobby has gone that warm amber colour that Maple's sconces produce in bad weather.
"Can I ask you something personal?" I say.
"Depends."
"When you saw me pull up that first day. You'd already decided."
"Yes."
"What exactly had you decided?"
He looks at the rain on the window. "That you were there to find a number that worked for the carrier and call it fair. That your job was to protect the company from my clients." A pause. "I was wrong."
"You looked at me and saw every adjuster who'd ever underpaid someone you cared about," I say. "I left a firm specifically because my supervisor was doing exactly that. I rebuilt from nothing so I could do this job correctly." I hold his gaze. "I've been working against that assumption my entire career."
"I know," he says. "That was wrong." He looks at me steadily. "I see you clearly. I've seen you clearly since the Hancock property. The reflex wasn't fair."
Something in his face is open in a way it hasn't been before. A door that has been shut since the moment he came off that roof and decided what category I belonged in, and now it isn't shut anymore.
"Okay," I say.
He reaches out and puts his hand on the back of my chair. Close enough to feel the warmth of it.
Neither of us moves. Then he leans in and kisses me.
I make a sound and then I'm kissing him back and my hand comes up and grabs his jacket lapel He puts his hand in my hair. It's not careful. Nothing about this has been careful from the first day. We've both been pretending otherwise.
We stay like that for a long moment with the rain on the windows and the sconces doing their work.
Then I pull back. My hand is still on his lapel. I don't let go of it.
"I don't do things that aren't real," I say.
"Neither do I." He stays close. "So we'll figure out what's real."
My phone goes off.
We both look at it on the table. Ian's name on the screen.
