Circle Back

I didn't ask Duncan what he'd decided in Dr. Harrow's waiting room. He didn't tell me. We were two insomniacs with a mutual respect for privacy and one shared ceiling.

But things at Corvel Packaging started to change.

The first thing I noticed was the silence. Duncan's emails stopped arriving at three in the morning.

I only knew because I checked the timestamps over breakfast, since I was now asleep at three in the morning like a regular citizen. The new emails came at 8:15 and 9:40 and 11:05. They had subject lines and body text, and some of them even decided things.

Night overtime: let's try two rotating crews in January, one read. Thoughts by Friday. Then I'm picking.

Rafe printed it out and pinned it to his corkboard like a moon landing.

---

The second thing that changed was the whiteboard.

Duncan started clearing it, one item a day, every morning at 9:05, before the coffee had finished brewing.

He'd walk into Conference Room B, read the next number aloud, and make a decision. Then he'd erase it with the side of his hand. By the end of the first week, his palm was permanently gray.

12. Should we repaint the lobby? No.

27. Casual Fridays? Yes, but not shorts.

38. Fix the parking gate. "Somebody call the gate people," Duncan said. Loretta called them before he'd finished the sentence. The gate had been stuck open since 2022.

44. Can Rafe get a sixth highlighter color? "No," Duncan said. Rafe appealed. Duncan denied the appeal in under four seconds, and Rafe looked prouder than I had ever seen him.

People started arriving early to watch. Raj brought a coffee and leaned in the doorway like it was a sporting event. When Duncan approved item 50, a better chair for the reception desk, Loretta cried a little and blamed the cough drop.

The last item was in the top left corner. The marker had faded to a pale ghost of blue. It was written in Duncan's handwriting from a younger decade.

1. Do we need a whiteboard for this?

Duncan looked at it for a long time. Then he laughed his rusty gate laugh, which was getting less rusty.

"No," he said. "We don't."

He erased it. Then he turned the whiteboard around to face the wall. Loretta had it moved to the basement by lunch, next to the alpaca photos Phil still mailed us every Christmas.

---

The third thing that changed was me.

The new cue worked exactly the way Dr. Harrow had promised. Nobody could put me to sleep by accident anymore.

Duncan could say whatever he liked, and occasionally, to test it, he did. Nothing happened. My chair was just a chair.

But people could ask. And sometimes I said yes.

"Want to park it?" Rafe would say, when I'd been staring at a client problem for an hour.

Sometimes I said no. Sometimes I said, "Give me ten minutes, then ask again." And sometimes I said yes, and walked into the old supply room.

Loretta had converted it. She'd moved her desk to a sunnier spot and set up the rolling chair from Conference Room B, the one with the excellent lumbar support. She'd hung a little laminated sign on the door: PARKED. KNOCK IF ON FIRE.

The chair was mine, but the room wasn't. By November, four other people at Corvel were using it on their lunch breaks. Raj took twenty minutes there every Thursday and came out so calm he approved a vacation request he'd been refusing for months.

Rafe kept the log, with my permission, and Column E kept getting longer.

I renegotiated the Halvorsen account and found a supplier who could deliver our nesting panels two weeks early. In December, I was promoted to Director of Client Accounts. I got a new office with a window, and a ceiling with the same standard tile.

I didn't count the holes. I didn't need to anymore.

Harlan Fisk sent a crate of Honeycrisps on the first of every month. Each time, a note was tucked in the slats in shaky block capitals.

SLEEPING FINE. DECIDED ON A NEW TRACTOR IN ONE WEEK. WIFE WOULD BE PROUD.

I still saw Dr. Harrow once a month, for maintenance. The lemon drops were constant. The tan had faded.

In December I asked her, very casually, whether she'd seen anyone else from Corvel lately.

"Interesting question," she said, and smiled, and offered me a lemon drop. That was all I got. I read her license on the way out, a third time, in full, and admired it more than ever.

---

My first meeting as a director was on a Monday in January.

It was in Conference Room B. There was a new whiteboard on the wall, but it was blank, and its header said DECIDED.

Rafe sat in the corner with his sticky notes. Loretta brought coffee and her laminated card, now soft as a dinner napkin.

"Plain Talk Week ended in October," I pointed out.

"Plain Talk Week," said Loretta, "is a lifestyle."

Duncan sat at the end of the table. He had come as a guest, he said, to watch me run things. He was wearing a rubber band on his wrist, purely symbolic, and his beard was so neat it looked freshly drafted.

We worked through the agenda quickly. Then Raj raised the night-shift crews.

"We tried the two rotations," he said. "It's better. But there's a gap on Sundays nobody can figure out."

Everyone looked at Duncan. Old habits. Duncan opened his mouth, then closed it, and looked at me instead.

"I've been thinking about that one all week," he admitted.

It was a hard problem. Nobody had a quick answer. I did what I'd always done in that situation, a reflex I hadn't been able to shake in four years.

"Want to circle back to that?" I asked.

There was a pause. Rafe looked up sharply.

Duncan smiled. "Yes," he said. "I'd like that very much."

He settled back in his chair. His shoulders dropped half an inch. His chin lowered slowly toward his chest, like a drawbridge, very smooth. Within seconds, Duncan Pryor was peacefully, profoundly asleep at the head of my meeting.

Nobody said anything. Raj's mouth hung open. Loretta set a cherry cough drop down next to Duncan's hand without breaking stride. Rafe clicked the stopwatch on his phone.

I stared across the table. Then I understood, and it was like the floor of the room tilted a quarter-inch.

"Circle back," I said. "That's his cue?"

"Dr. Harrow told him to pick something he trusted," Loretta said calmly. She had clearly known for weeks.

"Something he heard often. Something that meant a decision was coming back around, and someone would be there when it did."

"It's my phrase."

"Yes, dear," said Loretta. "That's the point."

Rafe was already peeling a sticky note off his pad. He didn't need to check his records. He'd been keeping them since September.

"Two hundred and nine," he said. He wrote it down and stuck it on the table in front of me. "Every single time you said it, you actually came back to it. He noticed."

Four minutes later, Duncan opened his eyes. He looked like he'd been to a spa. He sat forward, picked up the cough drop, and unwrapped it.

"Sunday," he said. "We split the Saturday crew in half and stagger them. Raj, you'll hate it for a week and then love it."

Raj wrote it down. Rafe added it to a brand-new log, with Duncan's permission, under Column E. Loretta held up her laminated card at me, silently.

"Rules are rules," she said.

I took the card from her. I borrowed Rafe's lilac highlighter and drew a neat line through Circle back → come back to. "That one stays," I said.

Nobody argued. It was, after all, a decision.

That night I lay down at 10:30 and looked up at the ceiling tile out of habit. I started counting, just to see if it was still fourteen hundred and forty.

I got to twelve.