Chapter 1
When I see you for the first time, it’s clear that you have already seen me.
You stare from across the room, unabashedly, exhibiting no consideration for the possibility that your attention might not be welcome. I don’t like it. How rude, I think. How entitled. Even while a thrill disloyal to my feminist and self-protective principles rips down my spine.
You were scanning the sea of black and charcoal and navy, of tired faces tugged by artificial smiles, and your eye caught on me like I was a sparkle, a reflection from the face of a watch or an engagement ring trailing across the ceiling of the room. Your eye caught, and it held.
Heather, my coworker, an associate two years my junior and who accompanied me to the event, orders a red wine from the man working the open bar.
He passes it to her, along with an impractically small paper napkin.
She takes a sip, and it coats her teeth like she’s a vampire who’s been disturbed mid-meal.
She’s my closest friend at work these days, driven and sarcastic and shrewd.
But she’ll probably make partner before I do, and that will drive a wedge.
We’ll grow distant. I’ll invite someone else to these dreaded networking events.
The bartender blinks at me, eyes smiling, starbursts of wrinkles at the corners. “What would you like?”
“White, please,” I say, still thinking of Heather’s teeth. White, please, but nothing more specific than that, because choices are few at a low-budget event like this: red or white or beer.
I take my plastic cup of wine and taste it.
Unwillingly, my eyes find yours. I knew you would still be looking, and you are.
You stand in a little group with two other men—one youngish, like you, and one much older.
I draw my brows down in distaste, as if to communicate to you that I don’t like your staring.
It makes me feel unsettled, not flattered.
But you’re grinning, practically gleeful, by this point.
It is already too late. You believe that I’m seeking your gaze for a different reason, for the same reason you are seeking mine.
That is the sort of person you are, I think—assured, self-possessed.
I don’t know you, but I know this about you immediately.
“This is shit,” says Heather. She wrinkles her nose and tips her cup of wine toward me. “Smell it. I think it’s sour.”
I lean forward but only pretend to smell it. Even when it’s freshly opened, even when it hasn’t turned, red wine smells to me like wet leather, like the water that collects in the bottom of the trash bin that’s sat out in the rain all day.
“Because they’re cheap,” I say. “It was probably from a bottle with a screw-on lid. It was probably left over from last month’s event.”
Heather grimaces, but she takes another sip. “Well,” she says, straightening a bit, pulling herself taller, “should we mingle?”
I scan the room, which is packed tightly with lawyers, some in cheap suits, some in expensive ones.
Most old, but some young—the people and the suits.
Some are youngish, like Heather and me. I’ve just surpassed my ten-year anniversary in the workforce, and it’s been a long time since I’ve felt young.
The grind of private practice takes its toll.
The sea of faces, pale and tired, and the suits, navy and black, blend together indeterminably, interminably.
Still, I find you easily. This time, you aren’t looking.
Is that disappointment that flickers to life in my gut?
“I suppose,” I say to Heather. “Show face. Kiss a couple of asses. Then get the hell out.”
“Stop somewhere decent afterward?” Heather asks. “For something to eat and a real glass of wine?”
“Mmm,” I murmur noncommittally. I don’t want to stop somewhere decent afterward.
I’m tired, and I want to go home and go to sleep.
I mentally scroll through my calendar. A deposition the next morning.
I need to get up early and review my outline.
I don’t want to, of course. I would prefer to sleep in, take a spin class, shower leisurely and use that unopened foot scrub that has been resting on the corner shelf for the last month, stop for a pumpkin spice latte on my way to the office.
But I can’t do any of that. Instead, I must prepare.
Because I must make partner. I am thirty-five.
It should have happened by now, at a firm the size of mine.
It’s practically shameful that I—a career-focused, unmarried, and childless woman in her mid-thirties—still have the title of Associate on my business cards and in my email signature.
“Are they not serving food here?” I ask Heather, looking around the room again, presumably for servers hefting silvery platters or buffet-style tables dotted with dishes, but also for you. This time, I can’t find you.
“I think they are,” she replies. “If you can call it that. I’m sure it’s shit.”
The room quiets just as she finishes her sentence, and her final word—shit—rings out obviously.
Heather’s cheeks redden and mine redden for her, and for myself because of my proximity to her, my association with her, a person who has unfortunately and accidentally shouted “shit” into the ill-timed silence that fell over the crowd at a bar association event.
Silence fell because of the woman standing by the double doors that lead to the rented room of the restaurant. She’d been tapping on a microphone, trying to get the attention of those gathered inside. “Good evening,” she was saying, again and again, looking around hopefully.
“Thank you all so much for coming,” she continues, the microphone held crookedly beneath her chin. “I’m Audra Kohn, the president of the Montgomery County Bar Association. Welcome to the fourth-annual Judicial Reception.”
I drink my wine while she expresses gratitude to the sponsors who paid for the venue, for the wine that tastes like shit, and for the food that has yet to make an appearance.
Audra thanks the members of the association who planned the event, a mixer to show appreciation for and honor the county’s judges.
The sea of faces is all smiles; they nod.
They all know the event is really for flagrant ass-kissing and free wine, even bad free wine.
When she stops talking, I turn to Heather.
We’d shown face, hadn’t we? Should we just go?
It isn’t partner-like to leave so early, but I’m not a partner, and I’ve spotted Christine Fierra standing not five feet away from me.
Christine was a year behind me in law school, yet she is a partner at her own law firm, which is even larger than mine.
I know this from an update I saw on LinkedIn.
We were on Law Review together. Friendly, but not friends.
I don’t want to talk to her, to be looked at with a gaze that is both condescending and kind, to have her ask, “What’s partnership track at your firm, Klara?
Is it not eight years?” Innocent-sounding, but prim and supercilious, a veiled dig.
That is the sort of person I remember Christine to be.
But when I turn, it’s no longer Heather to my left. It’s you.
You are close, and you are smiling.
“Hi,” you say, as if we already know each other.
“Hi.”
I think I say it. But a second passes, and I’m not sure if I actually spoke.
My ears begin to ring because up close, you are very handsome, albeit a little short.
Your dark—almost black—hair, thick and wavy, is coaxed tidily into a side part.
Your eyes are light brown, just a shade darker than your tanned skin.
Your nose is straight and your cheekbones high, your features symmetrical.
All of it makes up for your lack of height, and you are standing quite near.
There’s a thrumming, a strumming, picking up strength within me, despite my brain screaming for it to stop.
We are inches apart, and I see so clearly now that you are, that you will become, precisely what I feared: A distraction.
A demise. Of something. Of what, I don’t yet know.
You hold out your hand. “I’m Troy,” you say. “Troy Weston.”
I look at your hand for a full three seconds, maybe more. I stare at it for so long that you laugh. “Are you really going to leave me hanging?” you ask. You laugh, but there’s a ripple of disbelief, of shame, of how dare you?
It is almost as if I know already, even though I can’t possibly know already: Take your hand, and it’s all over. I should eschew it—rude, but eschew it nevertheless.
My instincts kick in. I don’t shake your hand.