Chapter 13
Mercer & Cole has an unwritten rule about meetings with the senior partner: you schedule them in advance, you show up on time, and you're out in under twenty minutes, because Stephen Mercer is seventy-two years old, has forty years in the business, and has exactly enough patience for conversations he didn't start himself.
Abigail hasn't slept well in three days, and this morning she put on the dark gray pinstripe suit, because what she's about to do requires full armor, and this is the suit that makes her feel like a steamroller.
She knocks without hesitating.
"Come in."
Stephen Mercer has the largest office in the firm, and he's filled it with diplomas, photographs with important people, an entire wall of case files no one touches but him, and two leather chairs in front of the desk that have been there since before Abigail first walked into this building.
He's a man who radiates the solidity of someone who's been an institution long enough that he can no longer tell where he ends and the firm begins.
He looks up when Abigail walks in.
"Abigail. I didn't have anything on the calendar with you," he says, thoughtful.
"No, Mr. Mercer. I need to speak with you."
He gestures to one of the chairs. Abigail sits, folds her hands in her lap, and gets straight to the point, because Mercer appreciates that, and because she doesn't have the energy to dance around anything.
"I need to take a couple of weeks off. I assume you've heard about the allegations involving Congresswoman Montgomery."
"Of course. It's all over the news. I think she was right to resign."
Abigail tightens her jaw and swallows the urge to throw his paperweight at him.
"What are the two weeks for?" Stephen asks.
"I'm going to represent her. I need that time to build a solid defense, and after that I can work from here. I won't let the Vega case suffer, of course—"
"Abigail," Stephen Mercer cuts her off, and holds her gaze a moment without a word. "I understand she's your sister—"
"Stepsister," Abigail corrects, interrupting him, but she can't help it—every time she hears the word sister her mouth moves on autopilot. "I'm sorry."
He looks at her with curiosity, because he's always found it hard to understand how this woman works.
"I understand she's your stepsister," Mercer continues. "Family obligations are real, and this firm respects that. But what you're asking me for isn't time off to take care of a relative. You're asking me to free you up to get involved in the most high-profile case of the year."
"I'm not asking the firm to get involved."
"Everything any lawyer at this firm does involves the firm.
" Mercer folds his hands on the desk. "We don't touch cases like this, Abigail.
It's not a question of resources or scheduling.
It's a question of positioning. This firm has a reputation built on forty years of clean work and careful decisions.
Putting our name on a political scandal of this size, with the FBI involved and the press all over it—"
"Eleanor Montgomery isn't corrupt," Abigail says.
"She may not be." Mercer doesn't raise his voice. "But if it turns out she is, or if the investigation drags on and the media damage runs past what's manageable, the firm's reputation takes a hit. We can't afford that."
"She's not guilty. And I'll prove it," Abigail insists, her voice tight.
Stephen Mercer looks at her a moment, then exhales slowly. Not with irritation—more like someone who's had this conversation enough times to know how it ends.
"Abigail. I'm the one who decides what cases this firm takes. Not you." He says it without harshness, just a basic reminder of hierarchy. "That's not going to change."
Abigail nods.
"Understood," she says, and stands. "Thank you for your time."
She leaves the office and walks toward her own at the end of the hall. When she gets inside, she closes the door and sits down, but she doesn't open her laptop or pick up her phone to make calls. She just sits with her hands flat on the desk, thinking about the conversation with Mercer.
Two weeks. She'd only asked for two weeks, and she wasn't even going to let her cases fall behind.
She knows what it means—what Stephen Mercer didn't say outright: that if she gets involved in Eleanor Montgomery's case, her name drops off the list for the partner track. That if she chooses Eleanor, she's choosing her instead of everything else.
Abigail has spent fifteen years building her future as a lawyer.
Not at this firm specifically, but in this profession, in this city, at this level where the cases she handles carry real weight, the clients have power, and the partner committee at Mercer & Cole has spent two years weighing whether she's ready.
Fifteen years of early mornings, trials, impossible clients, and hard calls, and her name was first on the list.
Was. Abigail gets up and goes to the window, but she doesn't look at anything—she just closes her eyes for a moment, and the only thing she sees and hears is Eleanor's voice as she resigned.
Not the words, but the voice itself. The tone the world read as control and composure, and that Abigail, who has known every variation of that voice for too long, heard differently.
There's a tension Eleanor puts into her vowels when she's holding something back—subtle, invisible to anyone who hasn't spent two decades learning to read her—and at the resignation press conference, that tension was there in every sentence.
No one else caught it, but Abigail did. She always does, and she'd catch it even if she heard her from underwater.
She thinks of Carol saying you're the only one she'll listen to.
She thinks of all the calls she's made that Eleanor hasn't picked up, the ones she scrolls past on her phone because she likes seeing her name there.
She thinks of the garage and their hands intertwined and that moment of silence when they looked at each other. And she opens her eyes.
Abigail Lawson, who has spent twenty years making decisions with her head and keeping everything else locked in drawers she doesn't open, realizes this decision was already made before she walked into Mercer's office.
That it's been made for days—maybe since she watched the press conference on her laptop screen with her hands shaking, or maybe since Carol said what she said, or maybe a lot longer ago than that: in a garage in Pittsburgh, in a bed on Halloween, or in the backseat of an old Honda twenty years ago.
What she's about to do is going to cost her everything she's built here, and she knows it. But Abigail puts on her jacket and heads back out.
Stephen Mercer is with Marcus when Abigail opens his door again.
Both of them look up, puzzled. Her husband with an expression that mixes surprise and irritation, because he knows what's coming and he's not going to like it.
Mercer with his usual calm, though there's something different in his eyes—as if some part of him had known Abigail would come back.
"I'm going to represent her," Abigail says.
No preamble, no apology. Just those five words in the doorway of the most important office in the firm. Mercer looks at her a moment. Then he shakes his head, slowly, somewhere between impressed and disappointed.
"Then you're no longer welcome here."
Abigail nods, turns around, and lets out a short breath when she hears Marcus apologizing to Mercer before following her down the hall and into her office as she starts gathering her things.
"Abigail," he says, his voice tight. "You want to tell me what the hell is going on in your head?"
"I don't have to explain anything to you. You heard me."
"And you didn't think you should talk to me first? You just made me look like an idiot in there."
"It's my decision, not yours. I don't need your permission," Abigail snaps, pulling open the first drawer of her desk.
Marcus puts his hands on his head, then yanks at his tie to loosen it, like he can't breathe.
"You're seriously going to represent her? Eleanor Montgomery?" He says the name with a disbelief that edges toward contempt. "Right now, with everything hanging over that woman?"
Abigail opens the second drawer and sits down, sorting through what she wants to keep and dropping it into her bag.
"What about your cases?" Marcus asks, floored by his wife's composure. "What about Westfield? The Vega case? Everything you've got in progress?"
"I imagine you'll divide it up. You heard him—I'm not welcome here anymore."
"And your career?" he asks, incredulous. "Your name on the partner track? All of it just goes up in smoke because your sister screwed up?"
"She didn't screw up." Abigail pulls open the last drawer. "And she's my stepsister, not my sister."
"I don't give a damn what you call her!" Marcus's voice goes up a notch and he visibly works to bring it back down. "Abigail, listen to me. If you walk out, you're out of a job, with no firm to come back to. Do you understand what that means?"
"I understand perfectly."
He blinks several times, still thrown by her certainty.
"Then don't do it!" Marcus steps toward the desk. "Let her find another lawyer. There are hundreds of lawyers in Chicago who'd love to take that case. It doesn't have to be you."
Abigail doesn't look up from what she's pulling out of the drawer.
"If you'd made any effort to know her, you'd know Eleanor won't ask for help. She'll think being innocent is enough. So yes, it has to be me."
"And you know her that well? Christ, you two can't stand each other—every time you both disappear after dinner I wonder if either of you is coming back with scratch marks on your face."
Abigail goes still for a moment, her hand frozen around the strap of her bag.
Marcus had noticed they kept disappearing?
She lets out a short, disbelieving laugh without looking at him, thinking about how blind he is, how blind Daniel is, how blind their parents are.
If she were watching from the outside, she's pretty sure she'd have figured it out before the third time.
"We might not be able to stand each other. But she's my family."
Marcus stares at her, shaking his head, with a kind of rage Abigail has never seen from him before.
"You're out of your mind," he says, crossing his arms over his chest. "Just like your sister.
And I'm not going to stand by while you walk out and drag our name into this ridiculous mess.
If you go through that door, don't bother coming back here.
" Marcus pauses. "Or to our house, Abigail.
If you put me through this, I don't want you back. "
Abigail meets his eyes with a calm that throws him off balance.
"The house is mine too," she says evenly. "If I don't come back, it's because I don't feel like it. Put it on the market. I'll have the divorce papers sent to you when I get a chance. Now get out so I can finish packing."
Marcus doesn't move for a second, blindsided. Then he walks out and pulls the door shut quietly, as if he hadn't just been shouting, as if he hadn't just told his wife he doesn't want to see her again.
Abigail holds still for a moment, then goes back to packing.
She doesn't have much here. Everything that really matters to her is at her home office, which Marcus will no doubt send someone to clear out.
She puts her paper planner in the bag, two books that are hers, a photograph of her and her father in Pittsburgh, and the coffee mug she bought at a secondhand shop in Georgetown because she liked the color—probably because it's almost identical to the color of Eleanor's eyes.
When she's done, she opens her laptop and writes three emails.
One to James, explaining that she has to step away, that the pending cases need urgent reassignment, and that he should talk to Marcus.
One to the Vega case client, apologizing and specifically recommending James.
And one to Stephen Mercer—brief, no frills—confirming her resignation, effective today.
She sends them. Closes the laptop and leaves it on the desk, because it belongs to the firm.
She stands a moment in the center of her office, takes one last look around, and walks out without glancing back.
The hallway is nearly empty at this hour, and Abigail is grateful for that.
James spots her from the doorway of his own office and opens his mouth—he's just read the email—but Abigail gives a slight shake of her head and he closes it, because James knows her well enough to know that sometimes the best thing he can do is say nothing.
The elevator is slow, or it feels that way because she's suddenly in a hurry. The lobby of Mercer & Cole has that cold marble she's crossed thousands of times, and this afternoon it looks exactly the same as always—as if it has no idea something irreversible just happened on the fourth floor.
She steps outside and the cold hits her in the face, sending a chill through her as she walks to her car.
She left the Westfield case.
She left the Vega case.
She left her name on the partner track.
She left her marriage.
She left fifteen years of a career she built from the ground up.
All of it in forty minutes. All of it for Eleanor Montgomery.
Abigail reaches the parking garage, already thinking she needs to book a flight to Chicago the second she gets in the car.