Her Father's Lawyer (The Daddy’s Best Friend Club #1)

1. “Tuesday Morning”

“TUESDAY MORNING”

The cab idled on Park Avenue while I stared at the wedding ring on my left hand.

Three carats. Emerald cut. Platinum. More than I made in a year.

I should have taken it off at Tristan’s office.

I should have taken it off in the elevator.

But I hadn’t.

Which was stupid.

Which was exactly the kind of thing I was trying to stop doing.

I wound the ring around my thumb instead, tucking it under my palm so the stone pressed into my skin.

The pressure felt like something. Accountability. Evidence.

A very expensive paperweight for a decision I’d made two years ago when I was too young to know that making someone else happy wasn’t the same as being happy.

I closed my eyes and went back six weeks.

Walking into the office at Beaumont Capital. Tristan’s office had floor- to-ceiling windows and a view of the harbor that probably cost more than some people made in a year. He wasn’t there. He was supposed to be there. A 2 p.m. meeting, his calendar had said.

But he wasn’t there.

What was there instead was Camilla. Camilla from Yale. Camilla who’d lived two doors down from me in Branford. Camilla who’d held my hand when I found out my mother was sick and my hair started falling out from stress.

Camilla with her mouth on my husband’s neck.

Tristan’s shirt was off. His tie was on the desk. And Camilla—beautiful, kind, I-thought-you-were-my-best-friend Camilla—was pulling his face toward hers like she’d been wanting to do this for months.

Years, maybe.

I’d stood in the doorway for seven full seconds without either of them noticing.

Then I’d turned around and walked out.

I hadn’t cried in the cab.

I hadn’t cried at home.

I’d called my father’s house and told the housekeeper that I needed to talk to him, and when he came on the line I’d said: incompatibility. We’ve grown apart. He wants different things than I do.

All of it a lie.

The true thing was: he was using my former best friend as a preview of what his life could be without me in it.

The true thing was: I had wasted two years of my life on someone who’d been spending the last six months checking out.

The true thing was: I couldn’t tell my father, because my father was Atlas’s closest friend, and if my father knew what Tristan had done, there was a non-zero chance he would do something that would land us all in very different circumstances.

So I’d lied.

I’d lied for six weeks.

I’d worn the ring because taking it off felt like admitting defeat.

I’d worn the ring because it was easier than explaining.

I’d worn the ring because my hands shook when I thought about calling Atlas, and if my hands were shaking, maybe my entire body was a liar too.

Every morning for six weeks I’d woken up and the lie had been the first thing I thought of. The lie lived under my skin now. It had probably taken up permanent residence.

My father wanted me to use his firm’s usual attorney—Edward Faulkner, who’d been doing Whitlock family law for twenty years. Edward would ask gentle questions and file gentle paperwork and pretend he didn’t notice that I wasn’t wearing the ring when I signed things.

I couldn’t do that.

I couldn’t sit across from Edward, who’d known me since I was six years old, and tell him the reason my marriage had ended.

So instead I’d taken the bus to Grand Central and sat at my desk at the imprint pretending to work on a manuscript while I pulled up the Cain Sterling Hayes website and looked at the attorney bios.

Atlas Cain. Partner. Forty-six years old. The firm’s founding attorney. Specialization: high-net-worth divorce, custody disputes, prenuptial agreements.

He would look at me the same way he’d looked at me for twenty-six years— like I was my father’s daughter. Like I was something he was responsible for not looking at too closely.

But he would also be good.

He would be smart.

He would understand that I was lying about the reason I wanted him specifically, and he would also not care, because he was a divorce lawyer and he’d probably heard the same lie a thousand times in a thousand different versions.

I’d called his secretary at 5:47 p.m. on a Monday. She’d fit me in at 8:47 a.m. on Tuesday.

I’d said yes before I could think about what saying yes meant.

The cab pulled forward.

Park Avenue rolled past in its usual state of controlled elegance.

Old money. New glass. The kind of careful wealth that didn’t need to shout.

I’d grown up around this part of the city.

The Whitlock name opened doors that my parents had been opening since before I was born.

But I’d never walked into Atlas Cain’s office as myself.

I’d walked past it a thousand times as my father’s daughter, as the girl at the poker games, as the kid who’d been at birthday parties and holidays and Sunday dinners for so long that I’d stopped being a person and started being a fixture.

Every Sunday for four years since I had come home, he’d been at our table.

He’d been there when I came home from Yale. When I got the job at the imprint. When I got married in the Pierre three years ago, and my father had cried because my mother had died and she was missing it.

Atlas had been there for that too.

He’d sat across from me at dinner and his face had been still and I’d thought: at least someone knows what it feels like to lose things.

I was eighteen when my mother died. I was twenty-six when I realized I was looking at him the way you look at something that might save you.

Eight years of Sunday dinners.

Four years of him not looking at me.

Not looking at me different than anyone else.

He wasn’t married. I’d noticed. His ring finger had been bare for as long as I could remember. My father said he’d been married once, years ago, before I was born really. Said it hadn’t worked out.

Sometimes he came to Sunday dinner with a woman. Sometimes he came alone. When he came alone I would watch him eat and not look at his hands or the way he held his glass or the particular kind of precision he brought to every gesture.

I was very good at not looking.

Today I was walking in as Eden-who-needed-a-divorce.

Today I was walking in and asking him to help me undo something I’d only done to avoid looking at the one thing I couldn’t undo.

The cab pulled up at 8:47 a.m.

I checked my phone.

The time felt like a test.

Too early and I looked desperate.

Too late and I looked like I didn’t take this seriously.

8:47 felt like the time a woman with her life together would arrive to dissolve her marriage.

I paid the driver.

Stepped out onto the sidewalk.

Took the ring off my thumb and put it back on my ring finger because leaving it in the cab felt worse than the lie of wearing it.

The lobby of Cain Sterling Hayes was all marble and brass and aggressive air-conditioning.

My heels echoed on the floor.

I crossed with my shoulders back and my chin up and did my best impression of someone who belonged here.

The lobby was the kind of place where money sat in leather chairs and didn’t have to ask for anything. Other people got it for you. The doorman—I recognized him from when I was eight and my father had brought me here for a poker game that went late into the night—nodded like he recognized me too.

He did.

His face said so.

He’d known me since I was the kid in the black patent leather Mary Janes, holding my father’s hand in this exact lobby. That girl was gone now. The person walking toward the elevator was someone else entirely.

The elevator came fast.

I stepped inside and pressed 43, and as it rose I caught my reflection in the polished metal.

I looked like someone going to a funeral.

Black dress. Black shoes. Black thoughts.

My reflection looked back at me and I almost didn’t recognize her.

She looked older. Worn. The kind of woman who’d learned something sharp and wouldn’t be able to unknow it.

The kind of woman who wouldn’t forgive lightly.

My reflection looked like she understood that the ring on her finger was a monument to poor decisions and compromises that had accumulated like weight.

My mother had died eight years ago.

She would have told me to smile.

The elevator opened directly into the reception area.

Dark wood paneling. Low lights. The kind of calculated luxury that whispered money instead of screaming it.

A receptionist looked up from her desk.

Her face did the thing it always did when she recognized the senator’s daughter.

A small smile. A quick assessment. A mental readjustment.

“Eden,” she said, kind. “He’s expecting you. Corner office, past the east corridor.”

I nodded.

The corridor was exactly the way I remembered it.

Mahogany-framed doorways. Glass doors with frosted names.

The hushed quiet of a place where people made money by knowing which questions not to ask.

I passed three offices. One had the door closed, and through the frosted glass I could see the shape of someone working late.

The second office was dark—someone important enough to have left already, or someone important enough not to show up at all.

The third office had its door open, but the desk was empty.

I’d been here a dozen times in my life. Birthday lunches with my father when he wanted to talk about work and not have me listen.

A holiday party when I was twenty and wearing a red dress I didn’t like and talking to people whose names I forgot immediately.

One Saturday afternoon six months ago when my father needed Atlas to look over a contract and called him on a weekend and he came in anyway.

I’d never walked this corridor as my own client.

I’d never walked this corridor knowing that on the other side, someone was waiting for me.

I’d never walked this corridor knowing that I was about to ask him to help me dismantle the marriage I’d built to avoid admitting that I wanted him.

I passed three offices.

Then the corner office appeared.

The door was cracked open.

Through the gap I could see him.