Chapter Eleven
Cal
The elevator opens on the ground floor, and I gently press my fingertips into the small of Max’s back.
She doesn’t move away from it, she may even push back into it, and I see her shoulders come down just a little more.
I count that as a win.
“Excuse us,” I step forward and press into Max’s back again as she follows. “We have somewhere to be. Goodnight, Patty.”
I feel Patrick go very still beside me as I brush past him.
I slap my free hand on the front of his shoulder and then make a show—just for him and me—of wiping it against my pants before pushing open the glass doors in the lobby.
The cold hits us both and Max pulls her coat tighter with one hand, holding Bart’s leash with the other. I drop mine from her back because if I leave it there any longer, I’m going to have to think a little harder about what I’m doing and the consequences of it.
I don’t think I’m ready to do that on a Friday evening on a public sidewalk.
“He wants to talk to me,” she says.
“I know.”
“I don’t want to talk to him.”
“I know that too.”
She breathes out. The cold turns it to vapor, and I so badly want to reach out and touch her. I want to make up for every second she was away from me and every horrible thing Patrick did.
“He looks at me like I’m something he lost.”
He did lose something. The thought arrives with a completeness—not sympathy exactly, more like clarity you get when you’ve watched a situation from the outside long enough to understand it.
Patrick Ellison had the fucking tragedy of being too small and too stupid to hold something that was too good for him, and the even greater tragedy of not knowing it until it was gone.
I have spent years watching that from across an office. Watching him fail month after month. Watching Richard pass him up for promotion. Listening to the whispers and rumors of Max leaving him being his professional undoing because she did most of his work for him.
And after watching her for years in college make herself smaller to fit the shape of what he wanted and calling it love… I loved every second of his failure.
I still do.
I do not, however, enjoy thinking about how it all affected Max.
“He did lose something,” I respond. “But I think he looks at you like he’s a puppy who peed on the floor and wants forgiveness.”
She laughs once and it rings through the night air. “Oh, don’t make me sympathize with a poor puppy dog.”
“I’m not.” I steer her left toward the restaurant I’ve been thinking about all week, the Italian place two blocks down that does the kind of pasta that requires a full minute of silence after the first bite and reminds me of my mother’s cooking.
“I’m just being accurate. But he isn’t yours to deal with. ”
She looks at me sideways in a way I’ve seen countless times—the look that means she’s deciding whether to push back or let something go.
There’s a slight tilt to her head, a fraction of hesitation before she makes the call.
She’s done it four or five times today. I’ve noticed all of them.
I notice every little thing about her every second of every day I am near her.
But this… this isn’t new. I’ve been noticing the way she makes decisions since she was twenty and figuring out how to outwork everyone around her without letting them see how hard she was working at it.
“You’re allowed to be angry,” I tell her. “And he’s allowed to feel the consequences of being an idiot. Both things exist at the same time.”
“That’s very evolved of you.”
“I have my moments.”
She laughs again—surprised, like she didn’t mean to—and I file that magnificent sound away, too.
I hold the restaurant door. She passes me and I let the door close and she’s stopped just inside, turning back to look at me with an expression I cannot read yet, one that lives somewhere between question and decision.
The hostess grabs menus and walks us out to the patio lined with heaters since we have Bart.
“For what it’s worth,” I say, and lower my voice as I get closer to her where she walks in front of me. “And I mean this in a way that I’m not going to fully explain right now: he’s not who I think about when I picture you.”
She turns her head slightly, holds my gaze for a long second, and I watch heat rise into her cheeks. It makes me smile and something happy and warm settles inside of me.
My apartment is four blocks from the office and two blocks from the restaurant Max and I ate at tonight.
This was on purpose. When I heard from Richard that we were moving the offices, I rented this apartment specifically for its proximity to the office, told myself it was practical, told myself I wasn’t the kind of person who bought fancy furniture because I’m not home much anyway.
The apartment reflects this philosophy. It’s clean. It’s quiet. It has a couch that is fine and a bed that is good and a kitchen I use for coffee and not much else. The building is solid and anonymous, which is the arrangement I prefer.
I drop my jacket on the back of the fine couch and loosen my tie and open the window slightly because I think better with cold air. And I need to think.
Dinner went well.
That’s understating it considerably, but I’m practicing restraint. Because if I didn’t practice that restraint, I would have begged, or dragged Max back to this shitty apartment to have her in that perfectly fine shit bed, too.
She ordered the pappardelle and ate the whole thing without apology, which made me practically fall at her feet with happiness.
I appreciated every second of watching her enjoy something so thoroughly the same way I do, and it made me wish she could have Sunday dinner with my mother’s cooking instead.
Then she argued with me about case strategy for forty minutes over the Halbrook case and was right about two of her three points, which I also appreciated.
She laughed three times—really laughed, the kind that takes over her face, and lights up the room.
The laugh she sometimes tries to pull back like she’s been trained to make herself smaller, but then doesn’t, because underneath that bullshit Patrick had her feeling, she is brighter than the sun itself.
If I could put my fingers around his throat without consequence, I would’ve done it day one.
I pour two fingers of whiskey and stand at the window looking out at the street below, which is empty at this hour except for a cab and a couple walking a dog that reminds me of Bart.
Bart, who has apparently decided my office couch is his.
Bart, who looked at me this morning with the absolute certainty of an animal who has assessed a situation and found it acceptable.
He and I have an arrangement: he huffs at me first thing in the morning, takes the pets I offer, and he forces Max to come into my office to check on him at least three times a day.
During the times she is not in my office, Max looks at him, then at me, then back at her screen with a very deliberate neutrality that I find extremely interesting and beautiful.
I take a sip of the whiskey.
A phone buzzes on the kitchen counter.
I already know who it is before I pick it up. There are exactly two people in the world who call me after ten on a Friday on this phone. I just wish one of them was Max, which would require her to have this particular phone number, which is something I can’t rectify at this moment.
“Nico.”
“Brother.” The sounds behind him and his tone make it clear he’s been managing something all day and is now in a car, which means he’s either leaving something or going to something and neither scenario gives me a feeling of reassurance. “How’s the law firm?”
“Fine.”
His voice goes up an octave, mocking me. “Are you billing hours? Are you wearing a fancy tie? Are you having midday whiskey neat in fancy lowball glasses with your fancy lawyer friends? Are you—”
“What do you need.”
A pause. The sound of city traffic filters through the line. “People are getting anxious, Cal.”
I set the whiskey down and scrub my hand over my jaw.
“Dad’s been gone a long time,” Nico continues, and his voice has shifted—the humor not quite gone, just below the frustration, because it’s always underneath with Nico, humor is structural, load-bearing for him—but under that there’s something real.
“People keep asking questions I don’t have answers to.
About who’s making decisions. About the long term. About—”
“You’re making decisions.”
“I’m making temporary decisions. Everyone knows they’re temporary. I know they’re temporary.” Another pause. “You know they’re temporary.”
I look at the window. At the street below. At the cab making a left and disappearing.
“Goddamn it Cal, they better be temporary. I wasn’t made for being in charge of shit and you know it,” his voice is loud now.
“I’ve done what I can from here,” I say. “The Ferraro situation, the northern territory problem, the Marchetti contract—I handled all of it.”
“Remotely. In between what I imagine are very important depositions, and bending your very important secretary over your very important desk and—”
“Nico.” My voice comes out firm, but the picture in my head of Max on top of my desk takes up a brief second of my time.
I shake it off and focus back on the sound of Nico’s voice.
“I’m not criticizing the quality of the work, I’m saying the men want to see you.” His voice drops slightly. “Mom wants to see you. Sophia and Maggie keep asking when—”
“I know.” The word comes out rougher than I intend; I pick up the whiskey again. “I know. I’m not—it’s not that I don’t understand what you’re telling me. I understand exactly what you’re telling me.”
“So… then…”
“So, then… I need a little more time.”
Silence.
“The law firm.”
“The…” I pause and think about him rolling his eyes behind the wheel of a black SUV. “The work is—yes. The firm is—”
“Cal.” And now his voice has shifted again into the register he uses when he’s done dancing around something in the little brother way he does.
“I’ve known you your entire life. You have never, in the full twenty-nine years I have been acquainted with you, been unable to even describe a single important case and then needed thirty seconds to come up with the word ‘work.’”
I say nothing.
“Is there something at that firm,” Nico says, slow and deliberate, because he’s building toward something he doesn’t really care to ask but needs to know the answer to, “that is keeping you there. Specifically. Think real hard, brother.”
“The Halbrook case is—”
“Cal.”
“It’s a wrongful conviction, twelve years, the witness—”
“Calogero.”
I look at the ceiling. “Don’t full-name me like you’re our mother, Nicolas.”
“I’m not doing anything wrong here. I’m asking a question. Let’s try again: is it a what—like this Halboken—”
“Halbrook,” I correct.
“Is it a what or a who, Cal?” A beat. Then, with smugness that has defined his entire personality since birth, “Because if it’s a who, I’d really like to know who has managed to keep you at an office of a mid-sized regional law firm this long when you have an empire to run.”
“It’s not an empire.”
“It’s the likeness of an empire.”
“And I’m not running it. Go to bed, Nico.”
“I will, likely with a beautiful, dark-haired woman if I have my way,” he sounds wistful. “Maybe two. After you tell me when you’re coming home to take what’s supposed to be yours.”
I turn from the window. Look at the apartment. The just-fine couch. The good-enough bed. The kitchen I use for coffee. The total absence of anything that indicates a person lives here or cares to make a life here.
I think about the look on Max’s face in the restaurant tonight when she was right about Halbrook and knew it and waited to see if I’d admit it.
The way she laughed. The way she didn’t make herself small.
The way she lights up every room she enters and the way it fills my soul in every bright and beautiful way possible.
In ways I had forgotten were possible, if I’m honest with myself.
In the way I’ve been waiting to admit since the day I met her nine years ago.
Back when she just inserted herself into any place she wanted to be, with her wits and intelligence and God just every amazing part of her.
The way I wake up every morning with a spring in my step just because I know I get to see her again.
And I keep finding reasons to stay. Because it’s like stepping into the sun after a long winter just to be near her again. I can’t leave yet.
“I’ll come back,” I say it with finality. “When I can. I’m busy with something.”
“With the Halbrook case.”
“Yep.”
“And with the who.”
I don’t answer that one.
Nico laughs. It’s short and knowing and deeply annoyed. “Okay, brother. I’ll tell the men you’re working. Very important case. Very important.” Another pause as he raises his voice. “She must be something. Something dark-haired and curvy with a big, fat a—”
“Goodnight, Nico.”
“She must have some body for—”
I hang up.
I stand in the quiet apartment for a minute, spinning the ring that has rested on my finger for over a decade. The top has an R engraved inside a crest. A tiny horn carved into the metal side catches the light from outside as I glance down. The cornicello1. My grandmother’s idea of protection.
I wonder sometimes if she knew what she was protecting when she gave it to us as teenagers. Definitely did.
I finish the whiskey and rinse the glass because I can’t have the place looking like someone lives in it.
Then I find Max’s name in my contacts on the phone Nico didn’t call me on and I type:
Cal: Good call on the Halbrook alibi witness. I’m using it.
I set the phone down.
It buzzes thirty seconds later, and I think my heart actually skips a beat. Like a middle school boy with a crush.
Max: I know. Goodnight, Reed.
I look at the message for a moment longer than is necessary.
Cal: Night, Sims.
I press send and go to bed.
1. cornicello — known as the Italian horn, the cornicello is a traditional protective charm believed to shield its wearer from the evil eye (malocchio), ill fortune, and unwanted negative forces.