Chapter Seven
Max
Monday morning arrives with the cruelty of all Monday mornings that follow a Friday night you didn’t expect, and a weekend spent recovering.
I’m at my desk by eight-fifteen, which is earlier than usual, which tells me I’m trying to outrun my own thoughts. But they cannot be outrun.
I sigh and look at Bart, already asleep under my desk, and the coffee from Gabby’s next to my laptop is already half gone, and I am absolutely, completely, not thinking about Callan Reed standing outside Wildhorse with his hands on either side of my face telling me he came back for me just days ago.
I’m not thinking about it.
“Max!”
Carla’s voice carries down the stairs with the energy of someone who has been awake since five and already conquered part of the world. Just like every other day with Carla.
But I look up from my laptop, happy for the distraction.
“Can you come up here for a moment?”
I look at Debbie from across the room. Debbie looks at me. Neither of us says anything.
I take my coffee along for the ride.
Upstairs smells like Carla’s perfume and the slight cedar of old law books she keeps on the shelf behind the desk in her office more for atmosphere than reference.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen her open one.
She’s standing when I step in, which means whatever this is, she’s been pacing.
And pacing is never good news. It’s either bad news in general or bad news for me because I will have to solve the problem.
“Sit, sit,” she says quickly, waving me into the chair across from her desk and sitting herself, folding her hands on the surface in the way she does when she’s about to deliver something she’s rehearsed. “So. I have some news and I want to get ahead of it before you hear it from someone else.”
I wait. She rolls her lips together. This is her tell. I noticed it fairly quickly when I started working for her, and she does a pretty good job of reining it in when we are around opposing counsel and clients, but here in the office, she rolls her lips and we know she’s holding something back.
I brace myself.
“Richard Ellison came to see me on Friday, as you know.” She pauses.
“He made me an offer. A good one. He wants to fold our firm into Ellison and Parker—location, caseload, clients, the works. His firm takes the overhead, we keep our cases, I get a senior partnership arrangement that is, frankly, very generous, no name on the wall or anything, but you know that’s not my thing. ”
She says this last part in the careful tone of someone trying not to sound as excited as they are, but talks fast in the way that tells me she’s trying to push through the news rapidly.
I put my coffee down very slowly. “And you’re telling me this because…”
“Because you’d be included in the arrangement, obviously.
You’d have a full-time position at E and P, proper salary, benefits, the whole thing.
” She leans forward slightly. “Max, it’s a significant step up from what I can offer you here.
The cases alone—the scope of what Richard’s firm handles—opportunity for promotions, travel—”
“Where.” The word comes out flat because I already know the answer.
She blinks. “Oh!” She sounds excited, and my stomach turns as she points out the window. “The new offices. End of Main, just right down the block.”
I look out the window. I look back at her.
“I know there’s history,” she says it carefully. “With Patrick.”
“With Patrick,” I repeat, not looking at her as much as through her.
“And I want you to know that any concerns you have about the arrangement, I’m happy to advocate for you. You could come to work in the Wilmington satellite office with me, maybe? I can speak to Richard directly about your role, about boundaries, about whatever you need—”
“That’s very kind.” I stand up, done with the conversation, my mind already racing. “But I know Richard. I’ll handle it myself.”
Carla opens her mouth.
“Thank you, Carla. Really.” I pick up my coffee. “Working with you has been wonderful. I appreciate everything. I mean that.”
She closes her mouth. She nods. She knows me well enough to know when I’ve already decided on a course of action and she has to let me run with it.
I’m down the stairs and out the door before I’ve fully registered that I’m moving. Anger and something sour bloom in my chest. It’s distracting enough that I don’t think about Wildhorse or Cal or anything else.
Because my mind is set on one thing, and that is burning Ellison & Parker to the ground.
The sign is going up when I get inside the building.
Two guys on a ladder, familiar big, gold letters being pressed into the dark brick next to the elevator: ELLISON & PARKER.
The P is slightly crooked. I stare at it for a second.
Somehow that makes it worse. I frown and my stomach turns, the coffee in my hand is nearly empty after I busied myself with sipping while I walked the two blocks to get here.
The lobby is still half unpacked—boxes in corners, a receptionist desk that doesn’t have a receptionist yet, the smell of fresh paint underneath the older smell of the building.
A directory board on the wall still has the previous tenant’s name on it.
Nobody stops me when I walk to the closed elevator and press the call button.
The doors open quickly.
Patrick is inside.
And Brenda.
Inside my mind, I throw up, stomp my feet and scream into the void.
They’re standing close together the way couples do when they’ve forgotten anyone else exists—her hand looped through his arm, his head tilted toward hers mid-sentence.
He looks up at me, frozen mid-step, and something moves across his face.
Not guilt, exactly. Something more complicated than that.
It’s a grimace, like pain, like someone slapped him.
“Max,” he says. And his voice is—warm. Genuinely warm, which is somehow worse than if he’d been cold. “Hey. I didn’t know you were—this is a surprise.”
He says it with a low shocked laugh and goes to take a step before noticing my frozen state. Brenda smiles at me. It’s a careful smile, one that is guilty.
I look at the elevator walls, then I look at the floor. I look at the small seam where the elevator doors meet in the middle. I picture falling through the small slit in the floor so I can get out of this. But that doesn’t happen, no thanks to the universe.
“I’ll take the stairs,” I mumble to the floor, and I step back out before the doors close.
Two flights. Concrete stairwell, fluorescent lights, my heels on each step.
I cannot believe I am doing this.
I cannot believe I quit the job I loved in the building that used to hold those gold names in the lobby and moved an hour away and built an entirely new life in an entirely new town and Patrick Ellison has followed me here like a bad smell wearing expensive shoes and now I have to walk into his father’s office and negotiate my own terms like a sane adult when what I actually want to do is—what?
Oh, right, right, burn the building down, yes.
First landing.
This merger is an opportunity. I know it’s an opportunity.
The career-driven part of me is trying to reconcile that with this being my literal nightmare.
The cases E and P handles are real cases, meaningful ones, the kind I went to law school hoping to take on and then didn’t get to take on because I dropped out of law school to sit outside Patrick’s glass office in a pencil skirt—
Gasoline, matches. Patrick’s fancy desk as kindling.
Second landing.
Here we go.
I hit the crash bar of the door with my whole palm.
It flies open harder than I intended and bangs against the wall. Every head in the office turns to look at me including three people I don’t know, one paralegal I recognize from the old office, and—
“JENNI.”
My voice comes out at approximately double the appropriate volume and an octave higher than my normal voice. Jenni, sitting at a desk near the door, startles and then blinks and then frowns.
I lower my voice to a more acceptable volume, “Where’s Richard’s office, please.”
She stares at me for a second. Then lifts a tentative finger and points to the far corner.
I walk off in that direction. One foot in front of the other. Right, left, right, left, freeze.
Because through the glass wall of a corner office, I can see Richard behind his desk, silver-haired and unhurried, leaning back in his chair, a rolling laugh rumbling from deep in his chest as it echoes through the office.
And sitting across from him, jacket off, sleeves rolled up to show delicious tan, inked forearms, is Callan Reed.
Cal sees me through the glass at the same moment I see him. His face does something—a smile starting, automatic, like he can’t help it—and then it stops. Probably because my face is the exact opposite of a smile.
He starts to stand. Says something towards Richard that looks like ‘I can go.’
I shake my head once. No.
“I’d actually prefer a witness,” I say as I push the door open. “Sit, Callan Reed.”
I point at the chair he was previously in and he holds his palms up to me in mock surrender, rolling his perfect lips together to conceal a smile as he sits, facing Richard, who stands, still unhurried and unnervingly unsurprised.
“Max. What a Monday morning.”
“Richard.” I set my coffee on his desk. “I have terms.”
He sits back down. Folds his hands. “As expected, I think.” He winks at Callan.
My insides boil. Like Ellison and Parker uprooting my entire life a second time is a joke to everyone in this office.
“Salary.” He gestures for me to continue as I talk. “A real one. The kind I should have been making three years ago.”
“I’ll double your current salary, how’s that work for you?”
I blink. Double?
No. I shake off his response because no, that’s not enough.
“Case selection. I pick what I work. I’m not assigned anything I don’t want, and I’m not taken off anything I do want without my agreement.
” I pause. “And Patrick doesn’t speak to me.
Not about cases, not about office logistics, not about the weather, not about a goddamn fire if there is one.
He doesn’t email me, he doesn’t stop by my desk, and if we end up in the same room he can expect to be treated as furniture. ”
Richard’s mouth twitches.
“I—” I start.
Callan clears his throat, “She can work with me.”
Callan’s voice, from the chair behind me, is so calm and matter-of-fact that it takes me a full second to register it. I turn. He’s looking at Richard, not at me, one ankle crossed over his knee, completely relaxed.
“She can work with me,” he says again. “Case selection, desk placement, all of it.”
I turn back to Richard who lifts his eyebrows in question, waiting to see if this arrangement is acceptable to me.
I nod once, firmly.
Richard is smiling now. Not hiding it anymore.
“All of that,” he says, “is completely reasonable. And I am very happy to have you back, Max.”
He says it simply. Like it’s been decided. Like it was decided a while ago.
I pick up my empty coffee cup, trying to pretend I’m not flustered by his agreeable response.
“Good.”