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Suze Okafor calls me at nine minutes past eight on a Wednesday morning and doesn’t say good morning.

“Marek. Harbor and Main. Send me the paper.”

“The licensing agreement?”

“The licensing agreement, the schedule of payments, the term, the territory, the image rights, whatever it is, all of it. It should’ve come to me in February. That isn’t a criticism; it’s a filing problem. I have an audit in my own house in six weeks.” There’s a keyboard going the whole time she talks. “Forty thousand on a two-shop coffee company is a strange number. His face is worth more than that and their marketing budget is worth less than that, so somebody overpaid somebody. When I sit in front of an auditor, I’d like to be able to say which.”

There’s a coffee cup on my desk and the container yard four floors below. My hands are entirely still on the arms of the chair.

“I’ll send it this afternoon.”

“This afternoon.”

“This afternoon. It’s a three-year term with an annual option and the money is front-loaded into the first year because they wanted the association ahead of the playoff push. That’s the strange number. They bought a window, not a face.”

“Huh,” she says. “That’s actually clever.”

“It’s a small company with one good idea.”

“Fine. This afternoon.” A pause, and the keyboard stops. “Marek. He’s all right, isn’t he?”

“He’s playing very well.”

“That’s not what I asked.” The keyboard starts again. “This afternoon,” she says, and is gone.

I don’t have a licensing agreement.

I have a description of one that I gave over the telephone in ninety seconds to an agent who’s read four thousand of them. It’s now half past eight in the morning and it has to exist by four o’clock.

I close the office door, which I’ve never needed to do.

The first thing is the counterparty, because a paper agreement with a company that’s never heard of you dies the first time anybody picks up a phone. So I drive to the waterfront in a rented car. I buy a flat white in a shop with eleven seats and sit at the window until the owner is free. Then I introduce myself properly.

Her name is Deirdre. She has two shops and forty-one thousand dollars of stainless steel financed.

I tell her the useful shape of the truth: I represent an Ashgate player. He likes her coffee. He’s willing to lend his name to a bag, a window decal, and two social posts a year for the next three seasons. That my client isn’t looking for a fee.

She doesn’t believe the last part, which is the correct instinct, so I give her the reason. The reason is also true: that he doesn’t want it in the papers, doesn’t want an announcement, and doesn’t want his agent negotiating it, because he’s a private man and this is a favor to a business he actually uses.

“He comes in?” she says.

“He has a truck with rust on the door. He orders drip coffee, black, and takes it outside.”

Her whole face changes.

“The tall one,” she says. “Doesn’t talk. Tips in coins.”

“That’s him.”

She signs at half past eleven: three-year term, annual option, territory limited to the metropolitan area, image rights carved to packaging and in-store only, no appearance obligations beyond two a year with sixty days’ notice. She initials each page. I do the same, then photograph the signature page in her back room with the roaster going.

Then I go back to the office and build the rest of it.

The consideration is where a forgery dies. Forty thousand dollars didn’t come from Deirdre and never could have, so the money can’t be a licensing fee at all; it has to be a fee routed through a third party with a real reason to be paying it.

So I write a marketing services agreement between Harbor & Main and a small brand consultancy in the north of the city. I’ve used them for four legitimate clients; the principal owes me a favor from 2019 for reasons that are entirely lawful.

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