Chapter 5
BIG BOMB
Richard Collingworth’s office is bigger than my living room.
I’m sitting in a leather chair across from his desk—dark walnut, the kind of furniture that gets inherited, not purchased—and my folder is open in front of him.
He’s already been through it. Every page.
Every email. He turned them slowly, one by one, while I sat in this chair and watched his face do the thing men’s faces do when they’re calculating damage: tight jaw, flat eyes, the occasional slow exhale through the nose.
Now the folder is closed and his hands are flat on the desk and we are waiting.
“He’s on his way up,” Richard says. His assistant called down to Jermaine’s office four minutes ago—a meeting with the managing partner, come now, no context given. Richard’s voice is even, but there’s something underneath it. A vibration, like a bridge under too much load.
My pulse is fast but my hands are still.
Footsteps in the hallway. Leather shoes on hardwood—I know Jermaine’s walk the way I know his breathing, the way I know the exact sound of his key in our front door at eleven p.m. on a Thursday when he told me he’d be home by eight.
The footsteps slow as they reach the open door, and then he’s there.
Jermaine steps into the office and sees me.
His face goes through it fast—confusion first, his brow pulling together, lips parting slightly, a man who walked into the wrong room.
Then the recovery, smooth and practiced.
And then the smile—that careful, competent, I-can-manage-any-room smile that I have watched him deploy on clients, on judges, on me, for fifteen years.
“Hey.” He glances at Richard, then back to me. “What’s going on?”
Richard doesn’t smile back. “Close the door, Jermaine. Have a seat.”
Something flickers across Jermaine’s face—just a flash, gone before it fully forms. He closes the door.
The click of the latch is very loud in the room.
He takes the chair next to mine, and I can feel the heat of him, smell the cedar cologne, and my stomach lurches once and then settles, because I have spent a week performing normal across a dinner table and this is just one more performance, except this time I don’t have to pretend.
“Mara, what—“ he starts.
“Your wife brought us something this morning.” Richard slides the folder across the desk. It stops in front of Jermaine with a soft hiss against the wood. “Open it.”
Jermaine looks at the folder. Looks at Richard. Looks at me. I hold his gaze and give him nothing—no anger, no satisfaction, nothing he can read or respond to or manage. Smooth glass.
He opens the folder.
The first page is the email. Jermaine to Lauren Keeley, the subject line quick question, the Hargrove settlement numbers laid out in black and white.
I watch his eyes move across the text, and the color leaves his face in a slow wave—forehead first, then cheeks, then lips, draining downward like water through sand.
“These are emails between you and a paralegal at Harper & Locke,” Richard says.
His voice has dropped into something I haven’t heard before—not anger, not disappointment, but the flat administrative tone of a man executing a procedure.
“Eight months of confidential client information. Settlement figures, case strategy, privileged details from the Jasper Massey account. Shared with a competitor.”
Jermaine’s hands are on the folder. They aren’t moving. He hasn’t turned to the second page.
“Jasper has already pulled his account,” Richard says. “Effective immediately. Fourteen years. Gone.”
Jermaine’s head comes up. His eyes find mine, and what I see there makes something deep in my chest catch fire—not grief, not pity, not the complicated mercy of a woman who once loved this man.
What I see is a man looking at his wife for the first time like she’s dangerous.
Like he never considered the possibility.
Good
“This is—“ Jermaine starts. “Richard, these emails are out of context. This is a professional relationship. Lauren and I have overlapping cases, and occasionally we discuss—“
“The emails are explicit, Jermaine.” Richard’s hand lands on the desk—not a slam, but firm enough that the pen cup rattles. “I’ve read them. All of them. Including the ones that aren’t about client information.”
The color that drained from Jermaine’s face rushes back, mottled and uneven. His jaw works—the trial lawyer calculating angles, looking for the argument, the reframe, the redirect.
“This is a personal matter between me and my wife.” He says it with authority, like he’s filing a motion. “Whatever is going on in my marriage doesn’t concern the firm—“
“You shared privileged client information with a paralegal at a rival firm.” Richard’s voice doesn’t rise. It doesn’t need to. “That’s not personal. That’s professional misconduct. That’s a breach of fiduciary duty, a violation of Rule 1.6, and the basis for a disbarment proceeding.”
Jermaine flinches—a tightening around the eyes, a micro-movement of his shoulders.
“I’ll sue this firm.” His voice has changed. Lower, rougher, the veneer cracking at the edges. “If you think you can use my wife’s—whatever this is—to push me out of a partnership I built—“
“Your partnership is suspended effective immediately.” Richard stands.
The chair rolls back behind him and hits the credenza with a soft thud.
“You’ll be escorted from the building. Your office will be secured.
The bar association has already been notified about your transgressions, and Lauren Keeley has been reported as well.
Our firm will cooperate fully with both investigations. ”
“Richard—“
“Security is waiting outside.”
The room goes the kind of quiet that has weight—the air thick with it, pressing against my eardrums. Through the window behind Richard’s desk, downtown Sacramento looks the same as it always does.
Cars and concrete and people going to lunch who have no idea that the man in this room just lost everything.
Jermaine turns to me.
His eyes are wet. Not crying—he wouldn’t, not here—but the gloss is there, the involuntary shine of a man staring at the wreckage of his life and finally understanding who lit the match.
I look back at him.
I don’t speak. I don’t need to. I am sitting in a chair he never imagined I would occupy, in an office he never thought I would enter, and the folder between us is open because his wife—the one he told to stay home, the one he told would be bored, the one he looked at across their kitchen and told to make a little effort—found his emails and built the case and drove downtown this morning and handed it over and sat in this leather chair and waited.
He opens his mouth. Closes it.
Richard crosses to the door and opens it.
Two men in security uniforms are standing in the hallway.
Jermaine looks at them, then back at me, and something moves across his face that I will remember for the rest of my life—not anger, not defeat, but the bewildered, gutted recognition of a man who is seeing his wife clearly for the first time.
He stands. Buttons his jacket—automatic, muscle memory, the body performing competence while the rest of him falls apart.
He walks out without looking at me again.
The elevator takes forever.
I ride it alone, my back against the mirrored wall, watching the floor numbers count down. My reflection stares at me from three angles—the blazer, the earrings, the face that hasn’t cracked once in ninety minutes. I look like a woman who does this kind of thing all the time.
The lobby is marble and glass and too bright. I walk through it with my keys already in my hand—Catherine said to leave the building immediately after the meeting, don’t linger—and I’m halfway across the underground parking level when the stairwell door bangs open behind me.
“Mara.”
My feet stop. My body knows his voice before my brain processes it—fifteen years of that voice, and even now, even after everything, it moves through me like a reflex. I turn.
Jermaine is twenty feet away, coming toward me fast. He’s carrying a cardboard box—the sad beige kind with the hand-holes, a framed photo sticking up from one corner, a desk lamp cord trailing over the side. Behind him, two security guards are keeping pace.
“Mara, stop. Stop.”
I stop. Not because he told me to. Because the part of me running on adrenaline and cold fury for ten days wants to see his face one more time in this fluorescent light and know that I did this.
He reaches me. Sets the box down on the concrete.
His hands are shaking—I can see the tremor from here, his fingers vibrating against his thighs.
His tie is loosened. His hair is wrong, like he’s been raking his hands through it.
The tan from the reunion has gone sallow under the garage lights, and his eyes are red-rimmed and wide and furious.
“Why?” His voice echoes off the concrete walls and low ceiling.
“We could have talked about this. Whatever you think happened—we could have worked it out. You didn’t have to—“ He gestures vaguely upward, toward the building, toward the office where his career just ended. “You didn’t have to do this, Mara.”
The security guards have stopped ten feet behind him. Close enough to hear. I don’t care.
“Work it out,” I say. The words taste metallic.
“Yes. We could have gone to counseling. We could have sat down like adults and—“
“You told me the reunion was a guys’ thing.”
He stops.
“You looked me in the face in our kitchen while I was wearing a dress I bought because I wanted you to take me to dinner, and you told me wives weren’t coming.
You said I’d be bored.” My voice is steady.
I am astonished by how steady it is. “Then you took another woman. You put your arm around her in a college bar and let someone photograph it and she commented on the post—best weekend ever, can’t wait for next time—and you didn’t even think to check if someone I knew might see it. ”
“That’s not—“
“You’ve been seeing Lauren Keeley for eight months. Hotels. Dinners. You took her to The Firehouse, Jermaine—four blocks from your office, the same booth where I’ve sat through your firm dinners making small talk while you scrolled your phone under the table.”
His mouth opens but nothing comes out. The box sits between us on the concrete, pathetic, the dismantled debris of a corner office.
“And between the sexts and the hotel bookings, you sent her confidential client information. Settlement figures. Case strategy. You handed Jasper Massey’s private financial details to a paralegal at the firm that’s been trying to steal your clients for years, and you did it from your personal email because you were so certain your wife would never look. ”
“Mara—“
“You came home from that weekend with a tan.” The word comes out like a blade.
“You stood in our kitchen and told me I should make a little effort. You squeezed my shoulder like you were doing me a favor. Like the reason you took another woman to your reunion was because your wife stopped trying hard enough.”
His face crumples. Not dramatically—he’s still Jermaine, still fighting, still trying to hold the frame—but the structure collapses, the jaw loosening, the forehead creasing, the eyes going liquid. He looks old. He looks like a man who has just realized he lost something he forgot he had.
“I made plenty of effort,” I say. “I just stopped wasting it on you.”
“You have destroyed—“ His voice breaks. He swallows, hard, and starts again. “You have destroyed my career. My partnership. Everything I’ve worked for—“
“No.” I shake my head. “You destroyed it. Eight months ago. I just turned on the lights.”
A sound escapes him—choked, raw, something between a sob and a snarl.
One of the security guards shifts behind him, and Jermaine catches the movement, remembers where he is.
His jaw clenches. His hands ball into fists at his sides, the coiled fury of a man who has always controlled every room and has just lost control of all of them.
“I’ve filed for divorce,” I say. “You’ll be served.”
“Mara, listen to me—“
“Fuck off, Jermaine. Don’t you dare come to the house tonight. We’re done.”
I turn my back on him—a choice, a conscious act, the decision to stop looking at a man who spent years making sure I didn’t look at myself. My car is fifteen feet away. My heels echo on the concrete.
“You’ll regret this.” His voice behind me, cracked and hoarse. “When this is over and you’re alone and you realize what you’ve done—you’ll regret it.”
I open the car door. Look at him one last time.
He’s standing under the fluorescent light with his sad box and his loosened tie and two security guards behind him, and he’s still the man I married fifteen years ago in a garden ceremony where I cried during my own vows because I loved him so much it hurt.
I loved him so much. And he folded it into a drawer with his cufflinks and forgot about it.
“No,” I say. “I won’t.”
I get in the car. Close the door. The engine turns over and Jermaine is still standing there as I pull out—shrinking in my rearview mirror, a man in a parking garage holding a cardboard box, watching his wife drive away.
I make it to the exit ramp before my hands start shaking. I make it to the street before the first tear hits my cheek. Three blocks out—past the courthouse, past the coffee shop where I met Jasper—I pull into an empty lot and put the car in park and grip the steering wheel and let it come.
Not grief. Not regret. The seismic release of a woman who held herself together in an office and a parking garage and a marriage for longer than anyone should have to, and who has finally let go of the thing she was holding.
I cry until my ribs ache. Then I stop. Wipe my face with the back of my hand. The woman in the rearview mirror looks like hell and she looks like herself.
I pull out my phone and call Catherine Park.
“It’s done,” I say. “Serve him.”