Chapter 2
Tomorrow was going to be horrible.
Maxim Sheppard spun around in his home office chair before giving his computer a cold look.
It was updating. The scurrying progress bar showed this wasn’t going to be a lengthy update, but it had come at the exact moment he’d been in the middle of a flow, where any interruption threw him off track like a boulder in the way of a bicycle.
He’d put the update off for too long and the computer had apparently decided that he was no longer trusted with decisions about its health.
He would have preferred to be at work on a computer paid for by the firm and updated by the IT department, but Ivanov, Barry, and Cruz had stringent rules about staff loitering in the building after midnight, for some reason.
Maxim thumped his palm on the chair’s armrest. The new account was not his yet.
By all rights, he shouldn’t even have been working on it, and doing so must have been violating something, yet he couldn’t stop.
There were numbers to check, finances to question, potential litigation opportunities to delve into.
The announcement for who would receive the promotion wasn’t going to come for another—Maxim checked his watch and frowned—fifteen hours.
But if he was brought onto the account with ideas already percolating and a hefty base of knowledge already established, he would have nothing to worry about. At least for a few days.
He scoffed and made a half spin in the chair. He’d never been great at convincing himself.
The monitor’s screen flashed and a new progress bar appeared, this one lacking the speed of its predecessor.
Maxim scrubbed a hand through his hair and gave his computer another withering look. At the bottom of the screen, a little number informed him that the update was at a very impressive two percent.
Maxim spun to face away from the monitor.
His study was bathed in an eye-cramping blue glow.
The room did have a light, one of those half-domed glass bowls with a nipple-like protrusion in the center, but it remained off.
He’d planned to get a lamp to use instead of the overpowering overhead light, but four months into the condo’s lease, he’d reached the point where no lamp seemed right, and the very prospect of picking one out sent him spiraling into a bad mood.
There were simply too many options. The past week, he’d start scrolling on some elegant website only to hyperfixate himself into a cart filled with six different lamps and not actually liking any of them.
Maxim snuck a quick glance over his shoulder at the progress bar as if it were a child playing a game and would freeze if it saw him looking, and rubbed his temples with one hand.
The lamp was a distraction, of course. That was obvious. He was focusing on something he could control to keep his mind off of something he couldn’t: the possible promotion. The possible raise, the possible change in his life, the possible sense of purpose.
With a growl, Maxim pushed off his chair and thumped into the kitchen for a glass of water.
He shouldn’t think about any of that now. Especially since his computer was out of commission for probably the rest of the night (Morning? Day? Whatever), and the only end result of this spiraling would be a heavy layer of irritation and feeling like he’d swallowed a bag of eels.
The drink was cool and calming in his hand. He focused on the prickle of condensation, the tactile sensation of smooth glass and tickling beads of water. Outside the kitchen window, New Hawkshead’s lights glittered. Not nearly as bright as he was used to.
New York was a city of gleaming beauty and horrible filth.
It had an atmosphere to it, a tangible .
. . well, he didn’t want to say aura, because that was all hippie crystal-waving nonsense, but it fit.
The city was a breathing, writhing mass of intoxicating toxicity.
He loved it for that. In a city of eight million people, it was easy to blend in.
Easier to find distractions. He could hurl himself headfirst into his work and it would consume him in a way that left no time for spiraling or hyperfixating on replacing tit-like lighting fixtures.
Here though . . .
Maxim sipped his water and made a face through the window at the small, charming, boring cityscape of New Hawkshead.
At the New York firm, he’d been treading water in a sea of other champions of humanity, being sapped of energy and motivation. He had made as much of a difference as a light bulb illuminating the Grand Canyon.
Here at Ivanov, Barry, and Cruz, though, he could make change.
More importantly, he could make change that he could see.
In the last four months, he’d had more interactions with the very people he was trying to help than he’d had in all his time at Prosten and Sons.
The cases were smaller, the results not nearly as dramatic.
Instead of multi-million dollar lawsuits that shifted a mansion and a pack of purebred Pomeranians from one soft hand to another, a day’s success could mean a patient winning a case against their mildly negligent doctor, or a tenant proving their right to live in a rental without a gas leak.
He’d been making a difference and even received a few Hallmark cards to show for it.
But it still felt like he could do more.
Beyond the window, a distant searchlight marked the location of one of the more desperate car dealerships.
He had done his research before arriving here, and aside from the occasional disappearance, murder, or wild animal traipsing through town, there was nothing notable.
There had been some sort of newspaper-worthy event in a cemetery about twenty years ago that had ended with two dozen dead, which Maxim only remembered because it had sounded like the opening to a tabletop campaign, but it still paled in comparison to New York and its weekly horrors.
Maxim scoffed into his glass before taking a long swallow. One city was more memorable than another because of the number of homicides. Way to be the stereotypical hard-hearted lawyer.
Maybe he’d ask someone in the office if there was anything worth doing in town.
Or out of it, even. A local might know of some trails, or a comfortable bookstore.
It would give him the opportunity to get the hell out of his apartment and get to know the town that was now (at least according to his health insurance and driver’s license) home.
And, it’d be an excuse to talk to a coworker about a subject that didn’t include the word “asset.”
He could ask Pippa Beverly, one of the office’s assistants. As far as he knew, she’d grown up in New Hawkshead and probably knew about the local interests.
Short, curvy Pippa Beverly. She had hair that, when it wasn’t wrangled into a knot, came to her shoulders in molasses-colored curls.
A slight overbite made her top lip a bit larger than the lower one.
Her cheeks puckered with dimples when she smiled.
She had such big eyes, too, so dark they were almost black.
Maxim frowned at the droplets clinging to the outside of the glass.
He’d consider her quite attractive if she actually gave a damn about anything.
The firm assisted the people in the community with problems they couldn’t possibly solve themselves, and it seemed as if Pippa was the only one in the office who couldn’t care less about any of it.
She was distracted on the best of days and irritable on the rest. He wished that her indifference didn’t rankle him so much, but every time he caught her staring through the conference table during a meeting as if her boredom could drill a hole through the mahogany, he wished he had a ballpoint pen to jam up his nose.
What else could possibly be prioritizing her attention? It wasn’t his place to reprimand, though. He wasn’t her boss, and colleagues didn’t comment on the other’s lack of professionalism.
Maxim drained his glass, then arranged it carefully in the dishwasher. He glanced at the clock on the microwave and let out a low groan, then raked both hands through his hair. If he stayed up any later, the circles underneath his eyes would have their own area codes.
After one last look at the computer’s frozen progress bar and strongly resisting the urge to shut it down as punishment, Maxim stumbled into his bedroom, stripped to his underwear, and toppled onto the mattress.
The sheets were crisp and cool, the fan overhead sent down a lovely, calming breeze, and crickets and distant traffic murmured melodies through the open window.
This room, with its natural white noise and the barest hint of chill, was typically enough to lull him into sleep.
Typically.
Most nights didn’t come before a promotion. He’d pushed himself harder than anyone else at the firm, and tomorrow, he’d find out if all of the extra hours, sleepless nights, and caffeine migraines from diets subsisting only of coffee might finally turn into a job that would give him satisfaction.
So Maxim lay on his crisp sheets in his cool room and stared out of the open window at a town he’d barely gotten to know, and tried not to think about how his life was about to completely change.