Chapter 126: Seven Schedules
Schedule Four gave away a book the deed had promised never to touch.
On Tuesday, I found the error on page eighty-three of the retirement package.
My solicitor sat beside me in North Quay's controlled contract suite.
The neutral administrator displayed one page at a time from the locked review copy. Downloads and copy-and-paste remained disabled during review.
Schedule Four was meant to exclude our separate new work from every old right.
It named Seven Calls from Saltmere correctly in the exclusion table.
The cross-reference beside it did not.
It pointed to the old-editions licensing clause instead of the separate-work exclusion.
Read literally, my new novel could enter the managed pool for the six Marian Crowe books, including controls never agreed in my individual contract.
No summary disclosed that result.
The mistake lived in six characters at the end of a sentence.
I stopped the review and refused to treat it as harmless numbering.
The administrator opened a correction ticket without changing the reviewed version. The faulty package remained preserved as the source of the amendment trail.
My solicitor traced every reference leading into and out of Schedule Four.
Saltmere had no old-world character, shared pen-name permission or joint royalty term.
Its North Quay licence stood independently under my own name.
The corrected reference returned it to the exclusion clause and nowhere else. It did not enlarge North Quay's separate Saltmere licence.
I asked for the same check across Oliver's separate work.
The deed had to protect both directions, not merely rescue mine.
His project exclusion pointed to the correct provision.
That asymmetry proved the error was real without making it deliberate.
We resumed at the confidentiality schedule.
Its permitted-disclosure list covered solicitors, accountants, tax advisers and required regulators.
The agreed factual public questions page was missing. Its omission did not make the approved facts false, but it made lawful publication contractually unsafe.
Without that exception, either of us could be accused of breach for using the accurate contribution wording already approved for readers.
It could also let secrecy shelter a false account of the retired name.
I stopped the review a second time.
The administrator opened a separate ticket for the omitted public exception.
The restored paragraph allowed only the approved factual page and its linked contribution matrix, including future technical corrections that did not alter substance.
It did not release finances, private messages, unpublished manuscripts or legal advice.
My solicitor compared the wording with the previously approved public text.
Every sentence matched; no new publicity permission entered through the repair.
The two faults touched different rights chains.
That meant a spot correction could miss another copied reference elsewhere.
I required the entire deed and all seven schedules to be regenerated and rechecked.
The administrator warned that the extra cycle would move signing by one working day and require new certificates from every reviewer.
My solicitor showed me the added review fee before I confirmed.
I accepted both the fee and delay.
A punctual signature on the wrong rights was not punctuality.
The original package remained preserved with both correction tickets.
Two contract reviewers rebuilt the clean copy from the approved source clauses.
One checked forward references; the other checked them backwards from every schedule. Neither reviewer relied on the summary sheet.
They also searched every defined-work field for Saltmere, Larkspur and the six old ISBNs.
No separate manuscript remained inside an old-use permission.
The public exception appeared once, narrowly, and nowhere in the private financial sections, manuscript controls or client-account instructions.
At 17.46, the administrator issued a new package hash and full validation checklist.
My solicitor and Oliver's received the same certified version.
The package passed the two-person cross-reference review.
The electronic signing window was fixed for Thursday, 5 March, at 10.00 GMT.
This time, every page meant what its heading promised.