I had responded: Of course, how long is she thinking?
He had said: Four weeks probably, she has a few leads she’s following up on.
I had said: Okay, yes of course.
That was the entirety of the arrangement. Four weeks, a few leads, of course.
I showed it to Daniel after Lena’s dinner, not as an accusation but as a shared record. I said: I want us to be looking at the same thing when we talk about what we agreed to.
He read it. He was quiet for a moment.
He said: I told her probably four weeks.
I said: Yes. And it’s been eleven.
He said: I know.
I said: I want us both to be clear on that. Not to score points. Just so we’re starting from the same fact.
He nodded. Same fact.
This is the thing Martin Cole would later call establishing a shared ground, which I had stumbled into before I knew there was a name for it. The conversation that changes the situation requires two people to first agree on what the situation is, because if one person is working from a story where four weeks was always approximate and the other is working from a story where four weeks was a commitment, the conversation cannot reach the same conclusion.
We were, it turned out, working from slightly different versions. Daniel had experienced the four weeks as an estimate, a starting point. I had experienced it as an agreement, a promise. Neither of us had said clearly which we meant, and the gap between them had produced eleven weeks of drift.