Chapter 309 --309
He had brought a young woman who was introduced as his personal secretary and who had the specific quality of someone who had been chosen because she was good at her job rather than because her appointment served someone else’s interest. She was twenty, maybe less. She took notes with the focused efficiency of someone who understood that her function was to ensure nothing was lost.
Elara filed her.
Under: *his. Actually his.*
The meeting began.
He asked questions.
This was the thing about him — she was noticing it more clearly in the working room than she had at the reception. He asked questions the way people asked questions when they actually wanted to know the answer rather than when they were performing the act of asking. He asked them and then he listened, fully, without the partial listening of someone already forming their response. When something she said raised another question he asked that one too.
They spent an hour on the eastern coastal infrastructure.
She explained the transit rights problem. He asked about the legal instrument that would restructure them. She described the framework — carefully, not in full, but enough that he could see the shape of it.
He said: "Six weeks to draft it correctly. What does correctly look like."
She told him.
He asked three more questions about the drafting process that were genuinely sophisticated — not the questions of someone performing interest but the questions of someone who had been trying to understand this problem for months and had arrived at the limits of what he could understand without the specific expertise he was currently sitting across from.
"The private trading houses," he said. "The three with the exclusive contracts. Do they know the instrument is being drafted."