A Client Thanked Me for Twelve Weeks of Support I Never Approved—Then I Saw My Name in the Deal

PART 3

Curtis Vale’s office had glass walls and no door he ever closed.

Naomi closed it for him.

He looked up from his monitor.

“Serious face,” he said. “What did we break?”

“Rachel Kim’s kickoff deck says I’m providing twelve weeks of implementation support.”

Curtis leaned back.

“Right. Strategic support.”

“My resource plan has zero hours.”

“That’s why it’s strategic.”

Naomi waited.

Curtis smiled as if he had made a joke.

She did not help him.

Finally he said, “Okay. We probably got too specific in the deck.”

“We got specific with my name and twelve weeks.”

“The SOW is broader.”

“The client bought the deck too. Not legally. Practically.”

“I know how sales works, Naomi.”

“So do I. That is why I’m here.”

Curtis stood and walked around the desk.

At fifty-three, he had the easy confidence of someone who spent most of his day talking to people who wanted him to sound certain. Naomi did not dislike him. That made the conversation more irritating.

“We had a competitive deal,” he said. “They were worried about implementation risk. I showed depth.”

“You showed me.”

“You are depth.”

“I am also booked.”

Curtis nodded. “Which is why we’re not asking you to run the project.”

“They think I’m staying through go-live.”

“Weekly office hours. A couple readiness reviews. Maybe a few escalations. It’s not twelve weeks full time.”

“Then the deck should say what it is.”

“I’ll fix the template.”

Naomi heard the shape of the proposed solution.

Template problem.

One deal.

One cleanup.

“What about this client?” she asked.

Curtis spread his hands. “We take care of them.”

“With whose hours?”

“Naomi.”

“Whose hours?”

He sighed.

“Implementation has some flexibility.”

“My team doesn’t.”

“You’re not a delivery consultant anymore. You sit across multiple accounts.”

“That is why my calendar is full across multiple accounts.”

Curtis leaned against the desk.

“Look, I’m not asking you to donate twelve weeks of your life. I’m asking you to do what you already do. Get into the hard parts early, keep the team out of a ditch, make the client feel senior attention.”

Naomi knew exactly what he meant.

For years, when a project slipped, someone called her.

A client had bought the wrong integration assumption. Naomi joined the call.

A project manager had lost confidence. Naomi rebuilt the sequence.

Sales had promised a feature product could not deliver until next quarter. Naomi found a temporary workflow.

Those rescues rarely appeared as a line item. They appeared later in performance reviews.

Naomi protects clients.

Naomi operates above role.

Naomi brings calm to complexity.

She had been proud of every sentence.

Now Curtis was using the same history as if it were capacity planning.

“I approved two hours,” she said.

“We need more than two.”

“Then scope more than two.”

“We can’t go back to the client on day one and ask for money because our internal staffing is messy.”

“Then reduce what we promise.”

Curtis’s expression sharpened.

“That will look terrible.”

“I know.”

“You are okay with that?”

“No.”

He studied her.

Naomi understood the test.

If she cared about the client, she would help.

If she helped, the promise became true.

If the promise became true, nobody had to decide whether it should have been made.

“I’ll do the two-hour architecture review I approved,” she said. “After that, I need a staffed scope.”

Curtis shook his head.

“You’re making an internal issue visible to a new client.”

“It became visible when we put my name on slide six.”

He pushed away from the desk.

“Fine. Give me a day.”

Naomi opened the door.

Behind her, Curtis said, “I really will fix the template.”

Naomi turned back.

“Please do.”

Then she added, “I’m also going to check whether it’s only the template.”

Curtis did not answer.

At her desk, Naomi searched her calendar for the phrase TBD client support.

Gray blocks appeared across the last six months.

She had always assumed they were harmless placeholders.

There were fourteen of them.

Nine had eventually become rescue calls.

She opened the oldest one.

Created by: Sales Operations.

Not Implementation.

Naomi wrote down the date.

Then the next.

Then the next.

By three o’clock she had a list of seven clients where her work had begun after the contract was signed but before any resource request had reached her team.

The pattern was not proof of a plan.

It was enough to keep looking.

Before she left for the day, Naomi pulled the time entry from one of those seven accounts. It had started as a one-hour escalation call. By the end of the month, she had logged eighteen hours under internal enablement because the client project had no specialist work code.

She remembered asking the project manager where to book the time.

Anywhere internal, he had written. Sales says strategy support was part of the relationship.

Naomi found the old message and saved it beside the calendar list.

The next rescue account was similar. Twenty-two hours coded to practice development. An email from Curtis thanked her for “leaning in without making the client feel nickel-and-dimed.”

Again, none of that proved he had priced a deal around her future work. It did prove the hours had vanished from the account economics after she performed them.

On her way home, Priya called.

“Samira told me you found something strange.”

“I found a client promise with my name and no hours behind it.”

“Do you need me in the Curtis conversation?”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because I want to know whether I’m looking at one bad deal or a normal operating assumption.”

Priya was quiet.

Then she said, “That answer makes me more concerned, not less.”

“Me too.”