We argued on the steps of the Harmon Estate Legal Group for twenty-six minutes.
I know because I checked my watch when we started, a deposition habit, always track your time, and checked it again when Lucas said something that stopped the argument and I needed a moment that had nothing to do with him.
Twenty-six minutes of two professional arguers arguing about whether to do the thing they were both already going to do. Honestly the most honest conversation we'd had.
It started the moment the door closed behind us.
"We need to talk about page four," I said.
Lucas was already reading it. He looked up. "You got there."
"You already knew."
"I read faster."
"And said nothing in the room."
"You were processing."
Like watching someone discover a clause that upended their week was something that required respectful silence rather than, I don't know, a warning.
"Four nights a week," I said. "Minimum. Sixty days."
"Yes."
"In the same house."
"That's what four nights a week in a property typically means."
I looked at him.
He looked back with the patience of a man who had decided to let me arrive at my own conclusions on my own schedule.
"This is insane," I said.
"It's unconventional."
"It's an ethics violation."
"It's a potential ethics violation," he said precisely, "that can be managed with the right boundaries and full transparency to our firms."
"You want to tell our firms."
"I want to be ahead of it before someone else does."
I opened my mouth. Closed it. He was right and I resented it completely.
"There's also the joint declaration clause," I said. "Page nine."
"Yes."
"We have to agree. Both of us. Sell or keep. End of sixty days. And if we don't..."
"It reverts to the fund."
"So we do sixty days and walk away with nothing."
"If we can't reach an agreement. Yes."
I looked at the document. Looked at the street, tree-lined, afternoon light coming through the leaves, the world completely unbothered.
Raymond. What were you doing?
"I need to know one thing," I said.
Lucas waited.
"Were you close to him? Harmon."
Something moved in his expression. Quieter than the almost-smile.
"He wrote my law school recommendation. I clerked for him eight months after the bar. Lunch twice a year for six years." A pause. "He never mentioned you."
"He never mentioned you either."
We looked at each other on those steps and I think we both understood simultaneously that this was the point. The not-mentioning was deliberate. Two separate relationships, carefully kept separate, for reasons that were now locked inside eleven pages and whatever Raymond had taken with him.
I looked away first.
"Fine," I said. "We do it."
"Agreed."
"But we need rules."
"Agreed."
I looked around. Steps of a brownstone, no surface, no paper. I opened my briefcase. Found a pen. Found the only paper available, a paper bag from the coffee place near my office that had been there for three days.
I smoothed it against my briefcase.
Lucas looked at the paper bag. Then at me.
"Don't," I said.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were."
"I was going to say I also have a pen if..."
"I have a pen." I wrote HOUSE RULES at the top in capitals because if you're doing something absurd you might as well commit. "Separate rooms."
"Obviously."
"Separate schedules where possible. Coordinate by text."
"Fine."
"No case discussion on the property."
A beat. "That's going to be a bit difficult."
"I know. That's why it's a rule."
"If something urgent comes up..."
"Nothing is urgent enough to compromise the ethics boundary." I looked at him. "Agreed?"
He considered it properly. Then: "Agreed."
"No personal questions."
He tilted his head slightly. "Define personal."
"Anything not directly relevant to the property or logistics."
"That's broad."
"Intentionally."
A longer pause. He was looking at the paper bag with something I couldn't read and I had the sense he was deciding whether to push back on that one.
He didn't.
"Fine," he said. "No personal questions."
I wrote it down. Four rules. Four rules for sixty days, four nights a week, in a dead man's beach house with the most infuriating opposing counsel I had ever stood across from.
I folded the paper bag with the care of someone creating an actual legal document on takeout packaging and held it out.
Lucas took it. Read it. Looked up.
"You forgot one."
"I didn't forget anything."
"The study."
I had not forgotten. I had deliberately not written it because I'd assumed I was getting the study and hadn't wanted to open that negotiation.
"I get the study," I said.
"It has the better desk."
"I'm aware."
"I need a workspace too."
"The kitchen table."
"Is where people eat."
"People also work at kitchen tables. Documented phenomenon."
The corner of his mouth. That controlled almost-smile that appeared when I said something he found genuinely funny but wasn't going to give me the satisfaction of laughing at.
"Alternate weeks," he said.
Reasonable. Annoyingly reasonable.
"Fine. I get the first week."
I added it. Held out the paper bag.
He took it. Read it once more. Folded it carefully and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket, close, treated seriously, like an actual document.
Something about that I was not examining.
"One more thing," he said.
I picked up my briefcase. "What."
"The property. Have you seen it?"
"No."
"Neither have I." A pause. "We should go together. First time."
I looked at him.
"So neither of us walks in alone," he said. Not an explanation. Just a consideration, the kind that told you something about a person without them meaning to tell you anything.
I thought about walking into Raymond Harmon's beach house alone. The study. The chess set. The bookshelves.
"This weekend," I said. "Morning."
I went down the steps. Turned left.
"Ms. Stone."
I stopped. Didn't turn around.
"He kept a photo of you," Lucas said. "His desk. You were maybe twenty-five. You were laughing at something."
I stood on that sidewalk and breathed through what that did.
"I know," I said. "He told me once it was his favorite photo. I never knew why."
Silence for a moment.
"I think I might know why," he said quietly.
I didn't ask him to explain.
I walked to the subway and rode it home and sat with the eleven pages open on my coffee table and thought about a man who had kept my photo on his desk for years and left me a house with a stranger and trusted that I'd figure out what it meant.
Raymond Harmon had spent forty years on the bench making decisions that other people spent years unpacking. This was just one more. The difference was I was inside it this time and I was going to figure out what he was building before the sixty days were up whether he'd planned for that or not.