CHAPTER SIX #2
Of course, it was. Lila didn't wait to be told twice.
She anticipated and she delivered. And she did it all with that quiet, almost deferential respect that never crossed the line into sycophancy.
She wanted to learn, to be better. And she understood, with an instinct that couldn't be taught, that the way to learn from me was to show me the work first and let the results speak.
I appreciated that about her. I appreciated competence wherever I found it, and Lila had it in spades.
The firm was full of people who wanted my attention—junior associates angling for mentorship, partners angling for leverage, clients angling for a piece of the Marcelli name.
Most of them came at it wrong. They flattered or postured.
They tried to impress me with words instead of work.
Lila never did. That was the dangerous part. With Julia, I had a partner. She challenged me, called me on my shit, kept me honest even when I didn't want to be. She'd once thrown a case brief at my head at two in the morning because I was wrong and too tired to admit it. I'd deserved it.
With Lila, there were no edges. After years of being dissected by judges, threatened by men who meant it, and stripped down to the studs by the woman who knew every load-bearing wall in me, it felt too damn easy to pay attention to that, but it was impossible to ignore too.
She was beautiful the way a closing argument was.
Constructed, relentless, and designed to make you forget you were being worked.
Dark hair that never moved. Eyes that took inventory and filed it away.
She dressed like she was already the person she was trying to become, and the worst part was that she wasn't wrong to try. The worst part was that it was working.
It showed up in small ways. The way she'd find a reason to still be in the room when everyone else had filed out. A question about a strategy that had nothing to do with her caseload. The half-second longer than necessary that her gaze would hold before she looked back down at her notes.
I wasn't blind. I'd seen the way she looked at me. Like I was a verdict she'd already decided. What I didn't want to admit was that sometimes, I looked back. But it wasn’t blatant and I never touched her. I didn’t touch any woman other than my wife, ever.
I'd made that distinction years ago—the line between appreciation and desire was one I refused to cross.
Some men couldn't tell the difference, but I could.
The way I saw Lila had nothing to do with what I felt when I came home to Julia.
Lila's beauty was incidental, a footnote to her competence that I happened to notice the same way I noticed when a witness wore an expensive watch or a judge had a new haircut.
I'd never once thought about fucking her.
The idea was absurd, like comparing a well-crafted closing argument to the way Julia looked when she baked cookies at midnight.
Or the way her laugh started in her chest before it reached her lips.
Julia was home. Lila was a promising attorney who happened to be attractive.
The half-second glances meant nothing. I looked at talented people with interest, that was how I'd built an empire. Noticing potential was my job. Nurturing it was how I maintained power. If Lila saw something more in my attention, that was her problem to manage, not mine to correct.
The bottom line was that she couldn’t compete or compare to the woman I had fallen for because of a tie.
Julia wasn't flawless. She was real, and that was the thing nobody ever understood about why I chose her—why I kept choosing her.
Every morning, every case, every late night when the work finally ran dry, and I came home to find her asleep with a book still open on her chest.
Beauty was everywhere. I could find it on nearly any Miami block, in a well-turned precedent, or in a junior associate who dressed like her own ambition.
But Julia was the only woman I'd ever met who made me feel like the version of myself I actually wanted to be, not the one I performed for courtrooms and boardrooms and men who needed to believe I was untouchable.
She spent my money when she wanted to, and I never once flinched—but she never needed to be told twice that there was a separate account, quietly filled, just hers.
It was how she'd been raised. Prepared for the storm even when the sky was clear.
I loved that about her. I loved that she'd married a man like me and never once asked me to be smaller.
There were, of course, also the ones who loved her almost as much as I did. Julia's mother, Latoya, was the kind of woman who smiled at you like she was already writing your eulogy. Her father was worse—quieter about it, which was the part that kept you honest.
If I ever betrayed my wife, I wouldn't just be betraying her.
Julia would bury me. Latoya would unbury me and cut me to pieces.
My mother and mother-in-law would roast what was left over a fire they'd been keeping warm for years, and my baby sister would pull up a chair just for the pleasure of it.
By the time I was nothing but charred bits of a once-powerful man, my father and father-in-law would look down at the ash, exchange a glance, and handle the rest without a word between them.
I loved my wife. Madly. The kind of madly that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the fact that she was worth every single one of them.
I straightened my chair and pulled the Ruiz file toward me. "We'll start with Ruiz," I said. "Draft a final skeleton for A and B. I'll take C."
"Oh, look, you’ve stopped daydreaming," Eric replied dryly, already typing.
I ignored his tone and let the work come in and cover everything else like a tide.