CHAPTER TWO
BENNET
"Michael. For fuck's sake."
Rosalie pinches the bridge of her nose without looking away from the television, her knee bouncing a mile a minute.
On screen, Kelly Leighton from KTLA sits in her anchor chair, describing last Saturday's events with the careful enunciation of someone trying very hard not to laugh on air. Behind her, the headline reads: SULLIVAN STAKES: BILLIONAIRE'S WILD NIGHT LEAVES LITTLE TO THE IMAGINATION.
The footage is grainy. Someone's phone recording in low light — but unfortunately not grainy or low lit enough to make me unidentifiable.
There I am. Thirty seconds of me, chest deep in the Pershing Square fountain at two in the morning, holding someone's shoe above my head like a trophy while three of my college roommates do the same around me.
We are all completely naked. I am laughing, and I look like I'm having the time of my life.
I was having the time of my life. That's not really the problem.
"My entire career as an attorney," Rosalie says, "is funded by your bullshit, Michael."
"That's not true. You have other clients."
"Name one that brings me this much business."
I can't, so I reach for my coffee.
The news segment cuts to a panel. Four people with opinions about my life that I didn't solicit.
Some woman in a red dress says at what point does the board step in and a man in glasses says the real question is what this says about Sullivan's leadership and I stop listening because Rosalie has picked up the remote and turned up the volume, which is her version of making a point.
"Rose."
"I'm watching the news."
"You're making me watch the news."
"There's a difference." She sets the remote down. "The board called in a PR firm last Friday."
I set my coffee down. "Who told you that?"
"Jackson." Her eyebrow goes up. "Your own best friend and CFO called me because he didn't think you'd pick up."
"I would have picked up." I pause. "But a better question is why Jackson is calling you directly. Why are you calling him Jackson instead of Mark, and how does he even have your number?"
"I'm your attorney. Why wouldn't he have my number?"
I put a mental pin in the fact that my sister and my CFO slash best friend are apparently in contact without my knowledge and file it under problems for a different day. "I had a late night."
"A public fountain, Michael."
"The water was warm. It was a good time."
She looks at me the way she has looked at me since I was fourteen and said stupid shit with great confidence. The look that means she loves me and also, I am an enormous pain in her ass. She has seventeen years of practice with it, and it has only gotten more precise.
I lean back onto the couch and look at the ceiling. The penthouse ceiling is high; twenty feet, with custom plaster detail, cost more than some people's houses. I picked it because I liked the space. Rooms that breathe. I spent enough of my life making myself small.
"What does the board want?" I ask.
"What do boards always want?" She reaches for her own coffee. "Optics. Stability. A version of you that doesn't trend on Twitter for reasons that require pixelation."
"The footage wasn't that bad."
"Michael."
"Nobody saw anything important."
"Michael."
"It was dark..."
"I could count your ribs," she says pleasantly, "and I went to law school, not medical school."
I did not, in fact, think she could see that much. I revise my position silently and say nothing because she will take it as a win.
On television they've moved on to a segment about a proposed development in Koreatown, which happens to be one of mine, and I watch the aerial footage of the site with the particular satisfaction I reserve for things that are entirely mine — built from nothing, from the first investment I made at twenty-one with money I borrowed from one of the seediest loan sharks in Los Angeles, and paid back before anyone knew I'd borrowed it.
Sullivan & Associates. Seven years of it. Every corner of it earned.
The fountain thing notwithstanding.
"Call Jackson, they’re bringing someone in from that firm." Rosalie says.
I look at her. "For what?"
"Image management. The board wants the Sullivan name cleaned up before the Meridian deal closes in six weeks."
"I don't need a—"
"It's already done." She meets my eyes. "You can be furious or you can be strategic, but you don't get to be both at once, so pick."
I am, in fact, furious. I am also aware that she's right, which is the more irritating part.
The Meridian deal is the biggest acquisition Sullivan & Associates has ever attempted.
Three point eight billion dollars. Two years of groundwork, eighteen months of negotiations, and a public-private partnership with the City of Los Angeles that took every relationship I've spent seven years building to even get to the table.
The project itself is a full urban redevelopment of a thirty-acre site in East Los Angeles that the city has been trying to revitalize for two decades.
Mixed use — residential towers with an affordable housing component, commercial space, a hotel, retail corridors, all anchored to the new Metro line that breaks ground next spring.
The kind of development that changes a neighborhood for a generation.
The kind that puts a name on a building that outlasts the man who built it.
The city needs a developer with the capital and the credibility to execute at that scale. I need the city's cooperation on zoning, permitting, and the tax incentive package that makes the numbers work. We need each other, which is the best and most fragile kind of partnership there is.
What it is not, is resilient to bad press.
Councilwoman Patricia Reyes has been my champion on the city side for eighteen months.
She went to bat for Sullivan & Associates in closed sessions, pushed the partnership through committee over significant opposition, and is currently running for reelection in a district where her opponents are already looking for ammunition.
One phone call from her office last week made it very clear that my name trending for the wrong reasons was making her political life considerably more difficult.
If she pulls her support, the deal dies. It's that simple.
If the board gets skittish enough to follow, I spend the next year rebuilding what took two to construct, and Meridian gets handed to the next developer willing to navigate the city's bureaucracy with more patience than I have.
Three point eight billion dollars.
Two years of my life.
A fountain and some bad press.
"Fine," I say.
Rosalie's expression doesn't change, but something in it relaxes slightly. She's been worried. She hides it well, but I know her better, and the worry on her face has a specific heaviness.
"Who's the firm?" I ask.
She picks up her phone, opens something, and hands it over to me without a word.
The screen shows a company's page. Monroe Communications.
Clean design, nothing really flashy about it.
Houston based, which I note. The client list reads like a who's who of people who needed problems to disappear quietly and needed someone good enough to make that happen without leaving fingerprints.
Political campaigns. Fortune 500 restructurings.
A couple of names I recognize from situations that were significantly worse before they weren't, and then suddenly weren't mentioned again.
I hand the phone back.
"Set a meeting," she says. "We'll go to the board together. Get a full picture of what they think is actually at stake here."
"We know what's at stake. The Meridian deal—"
"Then act like it." She takes the phone and sets it face down on the cushion beside her, which means the conversation is shifting from attorney to sister, and I should pay attention accordingly.
"Michael. This bad boy image — the parties, the women, all of it — I know what it is.
I've always known what it is. But there are limits to what charm and deflection can absorb, and you are right up against yours.
" She holds my eyes. "You have worked too hard and come too far to hand them a reason to walk away from the biggest deal of your career.
So, whatever this firm needs from you, you give it to them. No questions asked."
I look at the television. The Koreatown footage has given way to the weather.
"Yeah, I hear you."
I can't even fault her for it. Taking a firm hand is what Rosalie does.
What she's always done. She stepped into the role nobody asked her to fill when our parents died — a plane crash, nearly fifteen years ago.
That kind of loss doesn't leave room for adjustment periods or soft landings.
She was twenty-four in her first year of law school.
She had her whole life arranged in front of her, and she folded it up without a word and came home to me.
I've never stopped being aware of that.
She watched me reinvent myself over the years.
Helped me shed a life that no longer fit, a name that felt like a wound every time someone said it out loud.
She didn't ask questions I wasn't ready to answer.
She just helped me become someone new and trusted that I'd tell her the rest, eventually.
Some of it I did. Some of it I carried alone because that felt like the only way to carry it.
I had to fight like hell to get here. She knows that better than anyone.
And she's right. I know she's right. The Meridian deal is not something I can afford to lose over a few bad news cycles. I need to get my ass in gear.
"I hear you," I say again. Quieter this time. For both of us.
"Good." She stands, smoothing her blazer like she has made her point and considers the matter resolved. She starts toward the kitchen, where our brunch has been waiting. "Now feed me, Seymour."
I let out a breath that's almost a laugh. "You've been waiting to use that."
"Since the segment started." She doesn't look back. "Move your ass."