Chapter 35
I never thought a hangover could last this long.
Okay, it was a whole week of Champagne for breakfast and an obscene amount of whiskey, but it’s been fifteen days already, I should at least feel a little better by now.
So can someone explain why it feels like I just woke up in the middle of a swamp, after getting run over by a truck, and now my whole body is a mix of mud and bruises?
Better yet: mud, bruises, and the deepest, saddest misery.
Coming back to work has been brutal.
We have two new interns who keep staring at me like I’m a case study. The great and ruthless Jasper Hassmann, Stanford golden boy, beast in the courtroom, now needs help remembering where he put his own pen and can’t cite a single article of the Constitution without Googling it first.
My assistant has already replaced the firm’s coffee grounds with some Colombian Arabica that may or may not have been tainted with cocaine at some point, yet I’m still equally exhausted.
She thinks it’s exhaustion. The other partners are starting to think it’s early-onset dementia.
No one has even considered that all of this is nothing more than one hell of a hangover. And a fucking broken heart.
Ha! Fuck me! I can’t even believe I just said that.
A broken heart!
If I mention that out loud, they’ll admit me to a clinic. Then they’ll revoke my license and get me fucking disbarred.
So what do I do? The same thing I’ve been doing since the first moment I set foot back in New York: I swallow every thought and emotion, and go through my day like nothing happened.
Is it working? Obviously not. Have I mentioned the ungodly amount of coffee I need every day just to stay conscious?
At this point, all I can do is be grateful that Robbie and Mila are still on their honeymoon, and no one’s seen each other in person since the wedding.
I don’t even know what’s going to happen when we do.
Connor sat next to me at some point at the airport and went on about bros before hoes or some shit like that and I almost punched his other eye just to even out the bruises. So I guess that ship sailed a long time ago.
Robbie forgave me for the lies. For the punch. For the fire. But I don’t think he’ll ever forgive me for screwing up with his wife’s best friend.
Maybe he’ll forgive me the day Mila forgives me – which will never happen – so nothing really changes.
Mila isn’t going to forgive me for any of it.
Not for the party, not for the punch that knocked Connor onto her grandma, not for Suzi who will probably never interact with anyone in our social circle again (and I don’t blame her, honestly), and certainly not for Julie.
As for Julie… I just hope she hates me enough to murder me at the first group dinner and finally end the suffering.
It’s fine by me.
It won’t be anything I don’t deserve.
Honestly, I just wish she hated me enough to come over here and shoot me in the head right now, just to spare me another minute of this meeting. But she probably wouldn’t be that merciful.
It feels like I’ve been here for hours, but the clock reads 11:45, so it’s only been fifteen minutes. I’m sweating under my suit, even with all three air conditioners running and set to simulate the Arctic.
“So, to summarize,” someone says, “Mr. Davenport’s assistant made the mistake of telling the press that the fifty million dollars he transferred to a nonexistent foundation in Panama was just a misunderstanding.”
A misunderstanding. Of course.
“And now Davenport wants to sue the paper that published the article, claiming defamation and personal damages?” Mark Price, aka the senior partner of the firm, aka founder of Price, Costa & Jones, aka my boss, asks, a slight edge of impatience in his tone.
“We’ve already spoken with him about it–” Carol, our other senior associate begins.
She looks at me to explain, but I stay silent, watching everything unfold, my head pounding as if someone is drilling a hole inside my brain, just from trying to stay present instead of wandering off somewhere else.
To Cancún.
To the moment I opened that damn door and found the room empty.
“He knows we need discretion right now,” Carol continues, the anxious eyes of every partner in the room on her.
Mr. Davenport is one of the wealthiest men in New York. Our most consistent client. And the only thing I can think is that I don’t give a flying fuck about Davenport, Panama, or any of these missing millions.
“He can’t threaten the press, he can’t start a social media scandal.”
“He can’t try to buy the jury again like last time,” one of the interns adds nervously.
“He could probably buy us just to put up with this shit.” Brandon Jones, my boss’s son and heir, adds, with a crooked laugh. “I need a new Bentley.”
And they all follow along, entertained by their own cynicism.
The drill in my head goes back to life, now joined by a jackhammer.
I waited all morning for her to come down. I waited while stuffing myself with coffee, rehearsing what to say. I had so much I wanted to say.
“Hassmann?” someone calls, voice loud, firm. I have the sense it’s not the first time they’re saying my name.
I lift my eyes slowly, exhausted. God, I’m exhausted.
“You’re listening?” Mark presses, his wrinkled eyes searching mine with concern.
“Of course I am. Davenport needs to shut his pie hole and let the lawyers handle the case. As always.”
“You okay?” Costa asks softly from the chair next to me.
“Define okay,” I answer, making zero effort to stay composed.
I should be, of course I should. Costa is also my boss. She has the right to do whatever she wants with me before I cause a problem.
At this point, it’s just a matter of time.
The room was clean. Bed made, curtains drawn. No suitcase, no clothes, no Julie.
She left without a word.
“You seem a little…” my boss hesitates, searching for the right word, “…unsteady.”
She just left.
Mila didn’t say where. Or how. Or what I should do to fix this.
Robbie just told me to shower and wash the hangover off my face.
“We need to focus now, Jasper,” she says quietly, still a side conversation in the middle of the meeting, still a motherly scolding, pulling me aside before anyone notices I’m barely holding it together.
“I don’t know what’s going on with you, but defending Davenport is our only priority.
You know the repercussions of cases this big, if we mess up, we lose the client, money, our reputation… ”
I lean back in my chair, staring at the huge screen projecting the case evidence. Spreadsheets, encrypted emails, money transfers.
All those zeros.
All that nothing.
“And what else?” I cut in, with a bitter laugh. “Our souls? We lost those a long time ago.”
Costa sighs, her shoulders slumping in frustration. And there goes the side scolding, because now everyone is paying attention to me.
Mark isn’t looking at me this time. His furrowed brow and squinting eyes go straight to Carol.
Carol, who’s been working directly with me for three years. Carol, who plans everything by my side, wins and loses cases by my side. Carol, who’s been carrying our workload alone since I returned from Mexico.
“He’s been like this all week, Mr. Price,” she shrugs. “I swear I’m trying, but I don’t know what–”
“I’ve never seen anyone come back from a vacation this disheartened,” Brandon Jones tries to joke again.
Disheartened.
A technically accurate assessment. Perfectly fitting for the circumstances.
“You got that right,” I mutter, emotionless.
Should I have done what Robbie said: showered, slept, taken care of my hangover? Obviously.
Did I do it? No, I didn’t.
Instead, I humiliated myself even further, hastily packing all my suits into a suitcase, mixing them with sand-covered shoes in a nearly criminal manner, but whatever.
Then I grabbed the first taxi I could find to the airport, bought a goddamn ticket to Tulsa because all flights to New York were sold out, and I needed a boarding pass to access the gates.
It could have been romantic, fun, like some dumb movie ending. Instead, I just watched her plane take off, then spent eight hours stuck at immigration explaining why I had suddenly abandoned my trip to Oklahoma, and whether there were any drugs up my asshole.
“We can’t let you go into court like this tomorrow, Hassmann,” Mark declares.
Finally some good news in this shitshow.
“Great,” I declare, standing up immediately. “Because I really don’t want to go to court tomorrow.”
“That wasn’t a dismissal,” he tries to justify.
“All I heard was dismissal,” I reply, ignoring the stunned look from my boss and the rest of the lawyers in the room.
I get ready to leave anyway. Button the jacket, straighten my suit, grab my phone and the stack of case papers the intern handed me, and head to the door as fast as possible.
“Thank you all and good luck to those staying behind...”
“Hassmann!” Mark tries to stop me.
“…I’m sure you’ll find a brilliant way to turn money laundering into environmental charity. That’s what we do best.”
“Jasper!” Costa intervenes. “What the hell!”
But I’m already slamming the door, hearing only Mark’s frustrated grunt and Carol trying to calm him down, saying she’s got everything under control.
That woman deserves a raise.
I stagger down the hall to my office as fast as I can, trying to avoid anyone following me to, ugh, talk.
My office is exactly as I left it: a dozen lawsuits piled on the desk, waiting to be reviewed and filed, four dirty coffee cups scattered on the shelf next to a series of books on the Constitutions since 1950.
In Liz’s defense, she tried to organize my desk a few times this morning but backed off every time I started yelling on the phone. Or muttering at the computer after another email.
Now she’s across the room, standing in front of her own desk with a huge box on top of it, while holding what appears to be… a handful of pink penis-shaped straws?
I stop right where I am, just staring, not processing, only trying to decide if it’s worth engaging or not.