Page 106 of Final Drive

“I had a line ready in there,” I tell her. “I’ve had a line ready in every room I’ve ever walked into.”

“Why didn’t you use it?”

“Because it would’ve worked.” The novice crew manages to catch a crab almost in unison, which shouldn’t be possible. “That’s the problem with being funny. It works. Everybody laughs, the bad moment goes away, and nothing actually changes. The room just feels better about whatever happened.”

Reese lets me sit with that instead of filling the silence.

“I’ve been doing it to you since the first week. Every time this house has needed somebody to sit still in a hard conversation, I’ve found a way to make it easier instead.”

“You’re very good at it.”

“I know. That’s what makes it work.”

She turns her head and looks at me. I can feel it, so I make myself look back.

“Keep going.”

“You told a reporter about your father three days ago, and I drove you home and made two jokes before we got there. One of them was about coffee.” I look down at my hands on the edge of the dock. “I’ve watched everybody else figure out what he can give you. Bo feeds you. Gray decides things. Tyler finds things out. Jackson stands in front of you. I make people comfortable, and I keep wondering when that stopped being useful.”

“Beckett.”

“I’m not fishing. Don’t talk me out of it.”

“I know you’re not.” She puts her hand flat on the dock beside mine, close but not touching. “Do you want to hear what you actually did in there?”

“Not especially.”

“Tough.” She waits until I look at her again. “Vance was going to move me, and everybody in that bay knew it. Gray could’ve told her no. Jackson could’ve scared the shit out of her. Bo could’ve stood there looking enormous until she got uncomfortable. None of that would’ve fixed it. It would’ve turned into a fight in front of a photographer.”

“So?”

“So you gave her a way to change her mind without making her the bad guy. You stopped her, got exactly what you wanted, and somehow left her feeling like she’d helped.”

I look back toward the novice crew. They’ve gotten the crab sorted out and are trying the sequence again.

“That sounds manipulative.”

“It probably is a little.”

“Great. Much better.”

“It is better.” Reese bumps her shoulder against mine. “You think your job is making everybody comfortable because that’s the part they notice. It isn’t.”

“What is it, then?”

“You know how to run a room.”

I turn to look at her.

“You always know who’s about to speak, who shouldn’t, who needs an out, and what everybody wants before they say it. You’ve been able to do that the entire time. You just use it to get laughs so nobody asks you to do anything harder with it.”

The novice crew takes a proper stroke, then another. I watch them get four in before somebody rushes the slide.

“That’s a hell of an accusation.”

“It’s an observation. You’ll survive it.”

I look at her hand beside mine. Five people asked me about the article today, and none of them got a different answer. I built those seventeen words before sunrise because I knew exactly what would happen if I didn’t.