The Buyout Clause

Halina and Gideon had run the letterpress studio together for eight years without a single written agreement about what would happen if one of them wanted out. It had never seemed necessary, the way a smoke detector never seems necessary until the toast catches fire. Then a company calling itself Bright Column Holdings offered to buy them out, and Gideon, to Halina's genuine astonishment, wanted to say yes.

"It's not even a real name," she said, reading the offer letter a third time at the shop's one working table. "Bright Column. It sounds like a vitamin."

"It's four hundred thousand dollars, Halina. That's not a vitamin, whatever it sounds like." Gideon rubbed his eyes, the way he did when he'd already had this argument in his head several times before saying any of it out loud. "I'm forty-four. I have a kid starting college in three years. I can't keep printing wedding invitations on faith."

She understood the arithmetic; she simply didn't believe the arithmetic was the whole question. Had money been the only thing either of them cared about, they would have sold the presses years ago and taken ordinary jobs with ordinary hours. Something else had kept them both here through two recessions and one flood, and she wasn't ready to pretend that thing had stopped mattering just because a number had finally gotten large enough to notice.

"What happens to the shop name?" she asked. "The equipment? Do we even get a say in what they do with it, once it's theirs?"

"They keep the name for branding. The presses go into storage, probably. Realistically, in a year, it's a logo on a website that used to be a place." Gideon said this flatly, not because he didn't feel it but because, she suspected, feeling it too much would have made the offer impossible to accept.

"So we'd be selling the thing that makes it worth anything, and keeping the parts that don't matter."

"Or," he said, "we'd be finally getting paid for eight years of not sleeping, and letting someone else worry about the roof."

Neither of them was wrong, which was somehow worse than either of them being wrong. Rarely had Halina felt so unable to argue with a position she still, completely, disagreed with. She looked around the shop: the cat asleep in a bin of scrap paper, the proof of a wedding invitation drying on the rack, ink she'd still be scrubbing off her hands at midnight. Then she tried to weigh it honestly against a number she couldn't actually picture spending.

"Give me a week," she said finally. "Not to talk you out of it. To figure out if there's a version of yes I can actually live with."

"And if there isn't one?"

"Then you buy me out instead, and I find out the hard way whether I love this place enough to run it alone." She almost laughed, hearing herself say it. "Which, frankly, terrifies me more than Bright Column Holdings does."

Gideon managed something close to a smile for the first time since the offer had arrived. "That," he said, "is the most honest either of us has been all week."