Page 30 of Return Billionaire to Sender

She holds out her hand, palm up. She wants my phone.

Everything seems to slow.

I grin. It’s not in any way funny, but I can’t seem to help myself—it’s just all so unexpected. I look from her slim hand to her eyes. Her suit is candy-apple maroon; the sky beyond her shoulder is a brilliant blue, but even those bright colors are curiously desaturated next to her flashing green eyes.

“You want me to hand over my phone?” I ask, incredulous.

She nods.

She was interesting before. Now she just got a hundred percent more fascinating.

“I can’t do that, Elle.”

“Then you have to turn it off.”

“That’s not something I can do, either.” I’m addressing her in my best negotiator’s voice. Laid-back. Downward inflection. Nothing to be done. Too bad, so sad.

The silence drags on. No coach pushes back against me. No employee of any kind pushes back against me. In fact, I can’t remember anybody outside of a business rival pushing back against me, and even that tends to be weak.

She straightens even more and juts out her chin; this is her power stance, I realize. I find that I love knowing that. Her and her prim little bow tie and her power stance.

“If I catch you on your phone again,” she says, “I won’t be able to check the box for today.”

I narrow my eyes.“What does that mean?”

“The box in the online form that is shared between Bexley Partners and both law firms involved in the suit?”

Is she joking? I give her an easy smile, the kind I reserve for a difficult negotiation session. “You wouldn’t be able to tick the box? Even if I can tell you everything that happens in the movie?”

She shakes her head.

I say, “Contrary to what you may have heard in the media, some people can multitask, and I’m one of those people. Business leaders who have gotten to my level are typically among the small percentage of people who can multitask very effectively.”

She sucks in her lips. She’s debating something. What is she debating? She says, “Do you know what happens when one of the boxes isn’t checked off? Orticked off, as you put it?”

“What happens when one of the boxes isn’t ticked off? You’re asking me, do I know?”

She hesitates, then, “Do you know what happens?”

I stiffen. Is she really going there?

“Do you know?” she asks.

I cross my legs. “This sixty minutes has already taken ninety minutes,” I say.

She puffs up a bit. In negotiations, as in poker, everybody has a tell. Is this puffing up part of her tell? Trying to occupy space? For some reason, I’m thinking back to our earliest meeting.You’re very kind, she’d said, labeling me with a positive emotion, proposing a preferred reality. Is shea wilier adversary than I’m giving her credit for?

“What happens if you don’t get all the boxes checked?” she asks again.

“I presume we’ll have to repeat that lesson.”

“What if I don’t want to repeat it?” she asks. “What if I have a timeline that I have to stick to? And the box would never get checked off?”

I feel this sudden and strange aliveness. “What would happen?” I ask.

“There would be an X there instead of a check mark,” she continues. “Can you tell me what that would mean?”

My pulse races. An X in one of the boxes is the nuclear option. I narrow my eyes. My lawyers wouldn’t agree to working with a firm or an executive coach with a history of playing hardball, but Elle seems to be doing just that.

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