Chapter 9
The fourth-floor conference room at Mercer she's spent three weeks studying every edge of the case, every potential risk, every clause that could become a problem over the next five years.
When Harrison handed her the floor forty minutes ago, Abigail spoke for twelve straight minutes without notes, without pauses, with that clarity she has when she's completely inside a problem, and Westfield looked at her with the expression of a man who hadn't expected the youngest lawyer at the table to also be the most prepared.
That was forty minutes ago. Ten minutes ago, without knowing exactly when or why, Abigail started not being entirely in this room.
She's still looking at whoever's speaking. Still nodding at the right moments, still holding her pen over the open notebook, ready to write down whatever needs writing. From the outside, from any angle around this dark oak table, Abigail Lawson is fully present — but she isn't.
She's in a garage in Pittsburgh that smells like motor oil and damp cardboard, with Eleanor's fingers laced through hers in the silence that followed, both of them watching their joined hands during that moment that lasted longer than either of them had ever allowed.
For three months that moment has been lodged somewhere in her brain she doesn't know how to clear, surfacing at the most inconvenient times — in the middle of a sentence, in the car on the way to the courthouse, at three in the morning when Marcus is asleep and she's staring at the ceiling.
And now, too, in the conference room with Gregory Westfield sitting across from her.
"Abigail?"
Marcus nudges her foot under the table and she blinks.
Westfield is watching her with the polite patience of a man who isn't used to repeating himself, but who, for some reason he hasn't yet decided on, is willing to do it this once.
"I'm sorry," Abigail says, crossing something out in her notebook as though that's why she wasn't paying attention — because she's good at covering. "Could you repeat the question?"
Westfield nods, and one of his advisors writes something down.
"I was asking about response timelines in the event of international litigation. Specifically, whether the firm has recent experience with European jurisdiction."
Abigail sets her pen on the notebook.
"We have four active cases under European jurisdiction in the last eighteen months," she says, her voice steady despite the uncomfortable heat that's settled in her back, because Abigail may be distracted but she doesn't like being distracted.
"Two in the UK, one in Germany, one in France.
The first three were resolved at trial in the client's favor within timelines ranging from eight to fourteen months.
The fourth is ongoing. If you're interested, I can provide the files under a confidentiality agreement so your team can review them before our next meeting. "
Westfield nods, and something that looks like a smile crosses his lips.
"I'm interested," he says, holding her gaze.
Harrison makes a note. Marcus says nothing, but Abigail can feel his eyes on the side of her face like a pressure she knows well and has learned to ignore.
The meeting wraps up twenty minutes later with Westfield shaking Harrison's hand, then Marcus's, then Abigail's. When he takes her hand, he holds it a beat longer than he held the others'.
"You impressed me," he says, looking pleased.
"Thank you," Abigail replies.
The advisors gather their things and Harrison walks Westfield toward the elevator.
"He seems interested," Marcus says.
"Yes," Abigail says, and gathers her things to leave.
"It went well, all things considered," her husband says, falling into step beside her as she walks down the hallway.
Abigail sighs and goes into her office with Marcus behind her. He closes the door and crosses his arms in front of her as she sets her laptop on the desk and leans back against the wood with her own arms folded.
"You want to tell me what the hell happened in there?" Marcus demands, gesturing off to one side as though the conference room is that way.
"Nothing happened."
"Nothing? Westfield asked you a direct question and you were gone."
"I apologized and answered. The meeting ended well," Abigail says.
"It ended well in spite of that moment, not because of it." Marcus moves closer to the desk until he's standing in front of her, hands in his pockets.
He doesn't have the easy expression he usually wears at home, where he sheds work like he's forgotten it entirely — something Abigail has never understood. Right now he's annoyed, and that irritates her because she's in no mood for his sulking.
"What's going on with you lately?" Marcus asks.
That catches Abigail off guard, because one thing is her being distracted and quite another is her husband having noticed.
"Nothing."
"Abigail." His tone drops. "I've been noticing it for weeks. You're somewhere else. You're here physically, but your mind is somewhere else, and at home I can let it go because you barely talk to me anymore — but here I can't afford to, not after what just happened in that meeting."
"It was one moment, Marcus. Don't be dramatic," she says, uncomfortable.
"It's not just today and you know it." Marcus takes a step toward her, lowering his voice. "You've been different since the last time we went to Pittsburgh. Did you argue with someone? Did something happen that you haven't told me?"
Abigail stiffens and clears her throat. Suddenly her chest is burning, her ears and hands too, because yes, something did happen in the garage — something that sends a wave of heat flooding through her entire body when she thinks about it — but she can't tell him that.
"Nothing happened," she says, wishing the conversation would just end.
"What about Eleanor? Did you argue with her?" he probes, knowing they can't stand each other, even if deep down they care about each other.
A chill runs through Abigail when her husband says that name, and for a moment she's afraid he knows something she hasn't told him — but she doesn't let a single crack of weakness show.
"Don't be ridiculous, Marcus. I didn't argue with anyone, least of all Eleanor. It has nothing to do with that trip. I've just been a little distracted — maybe because of the whole first-in-line-for-partner thing," she says, improvising something to steer the conversation away from Eleanor.
Marcus frowns, unconvinced, because he knows there are very few things that can rattle his wife. He loosens his tie and shakes his head, then takes another step that brings him closer to Abigail than she can stand.
"You know exactly what we look for before we make someone a partner at this firm," he says, and Abigail realizes he's no longer talking as her husband — that pleasant man at home who celebrates her wins.
Now he's talking as her partner, and that Marcus is different.
"We've built a reputation that didn't happen overnight, and we can't afford to have one of our best lawyers looking distracted in front of a client at this level. That's not acceptable."
Abigail looks at him.
"Are you done?"
"No." Marcus moves to take another step, but Abigail straightens and steps aside to go around to her side of the desk and sit down, because there's only one body she likes having that close and it isn't his.
"The fact that our marriage doesn't work and that I let you talk to me however you want at home doesn't mean things are the same here.
Here you're below me," he reminds her, as the chauvinist he can be.
"And just as I can convince the committee to make you the next partner, I can do the exact same thing to get you fired. Don't forget that."
Abigail doesn't look away from Marcus. She doesn't change her expression and she doesn't visibly clench her jaw — though she is clenching it, and she has the full force of her thirty-nine years and fifteen-year career concentrated on keeping her face exactly where it is.
"Get out, Marcus," she says, ice-cold.
He holds her gaze for a moment, furious, but eventually backs down and leaves the office, because he knows that rattling Abigail Lawson takes a lot more than a threat.
Abigail stays seated for a few seconds. Then she stands, walks to the window, and looks out at the Capitol from the angle her office allows, hands clasped behind her back, jaw still tight.
Marcus Coleman has been her husband for twelve years and a Mercer & Cole partner for six, and for twelve years Abigail has known that those two things don't coexist in a completely clean way — that there are moments when the husband and the partner blur together in ways she shouldn't allow and yet does, because it has made it easier to stay in a dead marriage she knows she needs to end, at some point.
She goes back to the desk and opens her laptop, but before her fingers reach the keys her mind goes where it's been going for three months — without permission, with a persistence she's stopped trying to fight because fighting it costs more energy than she has.
Pittsburgh, the garage, and Eleanor's hand in hers.
It isn't the sex that's throwing her off, or not only the sex.
That's been part of the inventory of her life for twenty years — something familiar and manageable, even unnamed.
It's the gesture that came after. Fingers laced together like that Halloween when both of them thought they could hold out and couldn't. It's that moment of watching their joined hands longer than they'd ever allowed themselves before, and Eleanor's expression when they looked at each other — an expression Abigail has spent three months trying to categorize and that doesn't fit into any of the categories she has available.
Abigail Lawson doesn't lose focus. Not in a client meeting, not in a courtroom, not anywhere something is at stake.
It's perhaps the professional quality she's most proud of — that ability to compartmentalize with an efficiency her colleagues have remarked on more than once, always as a compliment, never knowing that the efficiency isn't a natural talent but the result of years of intense practice at keeping certain things from crossing certain lines.
Today she crossed one with Gregory Westfield sitting across from her and two firm partners at her side in the most important meeting of the current quarter, because Abigail Lawson's mind was in a Pittsburgh garage with Eleanor's fingers between hers.
She closes the laptop and stares at the table.
She knows something is changing — has known it for months, and has been choosing not to accept it, the way you choose not to look directly at the sun because doing so has consequences — but today Marcus said you've been different since the last time we went to Pittsburgh, and her husband, who is many things she doesn't respect but not stupid, has seen something she tried not to show, and she failed, and that means the compartmentalization that has been her primary survival tool for twenty years has a crack in it.
A crack shaped exactly like a hand laced through hers in the silence of a garage.
She opens the laptop again and gets back to work, but her fingers take a few seconds to reach the keys, and during those seconds Abigail sits looking at her own hands — the same fingers that three months ago were tangled with Eleanor's — thinking that if she's gone twenty years without losing focus and this morning she lost it, something is happening that's going to be very hard to keep ignoring.