Chapter 12
Colleen called on a Thursday in the middle of June and said, "Something's happened and I don't understand it."
"That's not a sentence you use."
"No, it isn't." Paper. "The motion's withdrawn.
Filed Monday, no prejudice, no conditions, no covering letter.
That's the smallest part. Rennick's firm is now counsel of record on everything — not co-counsel, sole.
The V.L. signature block is off every document in the file.
And I got a letter this morning, from Rennick personally, confirming that his client's prior counsel has no continuing role in any matter touching you or the child. "
Erin stood at the kitchen counter.
"He fired her."
"Somebody did something," Colleen said. "I've been trying since Tuesday to find out what and I have gotten precisely nowhere, which is itself unusual, because I can usually find out anything about anybody in this state inside a day.
" A pause. "Erin, I want to be careful here.
There is a version of this where a man cleaned house.
There's also a version where a firm did some risk management about a discovery breach and the family put a lawyer in front of a bus to keep it out of a courtroom. "
"Which do you think it is?"
"I have no idea. That's what I'm telling you. For the first time in this file I genuinely do not know what I'm looking at."
Shannon thought it was a trick.
She said so in Erin's kitchen on the Friday, at some volume, with a dish towel in her hand for emphasis.
"It's June. She files that thing in April, they sit on it for six weeks watching you come apart, and then the week the school year ends — the week you'd have to start thinking about the summer, about where that boy sleeps for eight weeks — that's the week it all magically goes away?
" She threw the towel down. "That's not a man having a conscience, Erin, that's a negotiation. "
"Maybe."
"Don't maybe me."
"I'm not agreeing with you and I'm not arguing with you," Erin said. "I'm saying maybe. I've had two people tell me what this is in two days and neither of them knows."
"So find out."
"How?"
"Ask him."
Erin looked up.
"That's the trick," Shannon said. "That's the actual trick and I've only just seen it.
He's spent nine months making sure you can't ask him anything — everything through lawyers, no acknowledgment expected or required, I'm going to go and do some things you won't see.
That's not modesty. That's a man arranging it so that the only way you can ever find out what he's worth is to come to him. "
"He's blocked."
"You unblocked him three weeks ago."
Erin said nothing.
"Yeah," Shannon said. "I noticed. You told me on the boat and then changed the subject so fast you nearly went in."
She thought about it for four days.
That was the part she was proudest of afterward, and it sounds like nothing.
Four days. She did not do it on the Friday night after two glasses of wine, and she did not do it on the Saturday when Wyatt asked about the summer, and she did not do it on the Sunday when a Boston column ran three sentences about a dead deal and the word abrupt.
She read that one twice and put the phone face down and went to the harbor.
She did it on the Tuesday morning, at nine o'clock, at her own table, sober, with the whole thing written out first in longhand and then cut by half, because she was a professional and this was, whatever else it was, a piece of writing.
One hour. Thursday, 2pm, the Owls Head diner on the harbor road. Not the Point, not Boston, not anywhere either of us has been before.
Terms. You come alone. You don't bring anything — no papers, no gift, nothing for Wyatt, nothing at all. If you're late it doesn't happen and there isn't a second one. At three o'clock I stand up and you don't follow me out.
And there is nothing after it unless I say there is. If you want to read that as encouragement, that's your business, but I'd rather you didn't, because it isn't.
E.
She read it over. Then she added one more line, and it was the only part she had not planned, and she typed it fast so she wouldn't take it out again:
You don't have to answer this with anything except yes or no.
She sent it at 9:04.
The reply came at 9:04.
Yes.
Nothing else. Not thank you, not I'll be there, not one syllable of the enormous amount he must have wanted to say.
Erin put the phone down on the table and found she had to sit for a minute, because he had understood the assignment perfectly and instantly, and that frightened her considerably more than a paragraph would have.
He was there at ten to two.
She knew because she got there at ten to two herself, deliberately, to take the booth of her choosing, and his car was already in the lot and he was not in it — he was standing at the far end of the parking area with his back to the building, looking at the water, giving her the door.
She sat down facing the entrance and ordered coffee.
He came in at two exactly.
He had nothing in his hands. No folder, no bag, no coat over his arm, nothing in his pockets that made a shape. He had clearly thought about it, and had gone further than she'd asked, and she noticed and refused to be moved by it.
"Erin."
"Sit down."
He sat.
And then there was a silence, and it went on for about four seconds, and Erin realized with a small cold shock that he was not going to break it. He was going to sit in a diner booth and wait, for an hour if necessary, because she had said one hour and had not said what happened in it.
"You have fifty-eight minutes," she said. "I'd like you to use them to answer questions. I'm not here for a speech and I'll stop you if one starts."
"All right."
"Did you fire your sister?"
"Yes."
"When?"
"The Monday. Same morning as the withdrawal. Nine-ten and about half past eleven."
"Was it because of the motion?"
He looked at his hands on the table.
"No," he said. "That's the honest answer and it's the worse one.
The motion is why the timing looks like this, but if it was only the motion I'd have taken the motion off her and left her in the chair, and she'd have been fine, and everyone would have said I'd handled it.
" He looked up. "It was because of a lunch in March six years ago. "
Erin's cup stopped halfway.
"Blair told you," she said.
"Blair didn't tell me anything. Blair hasn't spoken to me and won't." A muscle went in his jaw.
"Vanessa told me. Two days after you went to Camden.
She came into my office and told me herself, in about four sentences, standing up — that she gave Blair the date in the March, and what she said, and the tone she said it in.
She was not confessing. I want to be accurate about that, because I've thought about it a lot.
She was explaining to me why my wife had turned up on Blair Chadwick's doorstep, so that I'd understand the exposure. "
Erin set the cup down.
"She thought it was a briefing," Graham said.
"She has thought everything was a briefing since nineteen ninety-something.
And I sat there and I did the arithmetic, and I got to my son being four hours old, and — " He stopped.
Started again, flatter. "That's when it stopped being a thing I was managing. "
"So you did it that week."
"I did it that week."
"What else."
"Everything," he said.
"Be specific."
"Counsel, gone. Trust authority, gone — the discretionary power and the appointment power both, which is the part that actually mattered and the part she'd have got back.
The Halvorsen deal is dead; I killed it on the Friday because the structure of it ran through her and leaving it would have meant leaving her a way in.
And Blair Chadwick is off every list this family has, in writing, to four different people, and I wrote to her.
" He said all of it in a completely level voice, like a schedule of properties.
"One paragraph. No explanation. No further contact of any kind, ever, and I told her that was not a punishment, it was the sentence I owed her in the first year. "
Erin sat very still.
"When."
"Same afternoon. Half past three."
"And you didn't tell me."
"No."
"Why not?"
And this was the question. This was the whole reason she had picked a diner and an hour and a booth facing the door.
Graham looked at her for a moment.
"Because if I'd told you," he said, "it would have been a receipt.
It would have gone in the pile with the car and the plane and the forty million and the thing about the corridor, and you'd have had to hold it, and be gracious about it, or not be gracious about it, and either way it'd be one more thing I'd handed you that you never asked for.
" He turned his hands over on the table.
"You've had six years of a man giving you things instead of doing things.
I'm not doing it again. Anything I did in June, I did because it should have been done in the first year, and it's got nothing to do with whether you ever speak to me again. "
"And if I hadn't asked."
"Then you'd never have known."
"That's convenient."
"It's the opposite of convenient," he said, and for the first time something came through the flat surface of it. "It's cost me my sister, a deal I worked a year on, and — " He stopped himself, hard, visibly, and put it back down. "No. That's a speech. I'm sorry."
Erin looked at the clock over the counter.
Twenty past two.
They did the rest of it in a way she could not have predicted.
She asked about Wyatt's summer and he answered without a single strategic word in it.
She asked what the trades were saying and he told her, including the parts that were bad for him.
She asked whether Vanessa would come back and he said probably, in two years, and that she wasn't going to, and did not decorate it.
At about ten to three he asked her one question, the only one of the whole hour.
"Is he all right? Not the — I get Wednesdays, I know how he is on Wednesdays. I mean is he all right."