Time Served (4 page)

I look down at the hastily scrawled words, enough to recognize it as an address.

“Come over Wednesday night.”

“What? Why?”

“I’ll catch you up on what’s been happening at Riverside.”

“How would you know?”

A muscle ticks in Dean’s jaw at my impolite and indirect mention of his time in prison. “I went back. For Ally and Kurt’s wedding. It was last year.”

“Sorry.”

“Whatever. You going to come over?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not going to clean up if you aren’t coming.”

I glance at Dean, but as ever, his expression is unreadable. Or maybe I’ve just lost the knack for interpreting his thoughts. I don’t know why it seems so important that I come to his house to take a walk down memory lane, but if my increased blood pressure is any clue, my body wants him to do more than simply reminisce.

“Okay,” I say, not sure if I’m telling the truth. “Wednesday.”

He nods, as though to himself. “Good. Eight o’clock.”

“Eight o’clock,” I repeat. “See you then.”

“My number’s on there too,” he says, backing away, tucking his hands into his pockets. “Call me if something changes.”

I nod and turn away, striding in the direction of my apartment, mind reeling. What just happened? We had a semi-civil conversation, Dean got some things off his chest, and yet somehow I don’t feel as though we’ve resolved much. If anything, I feel like some new questions have been posed—namely, why does my body seem to think fucking Dean Barclay is a swell idea, when my overstuffed brain knows much, much better?

Chapter Four

The offices of Sterling, Morgan & Haines take up three floors of the gleaming King Building in downtown Chicago. The partners, fourth-year associates, and assigned secretaries and paralegals work on the thirty-second floor; junior associates and legal support staff are on the thirty-first; and accounting, IT and the rest are down on the seventeenth for reasons I’ve never been made privy to.

We have amazing views of the city, and since every office is walled-in glass—with the exception of the partners, who have actual privacy—it feels as if we have access to all things, all the time. Everything money can buy.

It’s Wednesday—
the
Wednesday—and Parker and I are returning from another day in Camden in time for a five thirty progress report meeting with the partners to compare our findings with the interviews being conducted in seven other states.

We climb into one of the dozen shiny elevators that whisk us upstairs in record time. Since breaking up with Todd I’d been fortunate enough not to share an elevator with him, but today my lucky streak ends as the elevator slows at the seventeenth floor and he steps on. He holds my gaze for a moment, then nods at Parker and murmurs a polite, “Afternoon,” before turning to face the door.

Parker shoots me a sidelong glance and tries not to smile. I do my best not to kick him. And maybe it’s my weakened mental state or Dean pointing out that I don’t “relax” enough, but Todd looks good today. Maybe he just looks good when he’s not talking about golf. He’s several inches taller than my five-seven, with a swimmer’s broad shoulders and trim waist. His hair is shiny, his cologne is expensive and delicious, and—

What the hell am I thinking? The time to have sex with Todd Varner was two weeks ago, before I broke up with him. Not now, not while Parker is in the elevator.

We reach the thirty-second floor and both Parker and Todd move aside to let me exit first, as though I’m most excited about this meeting with the partners. When I step out, the back of my hand accidentally brushes across Todd’s hip and he glances at me, one sandy eyebrow raised in silent inquiry.

I want to be honest and shake my head no, but the way my hormones are suddenly raging makes me hesitate. Instead I shrug slightly, helplessly, and Todd’s look lingers an extra second before he exits the elevator, offers us another polite nod and moves off to do whatever it is he came up here to do.

“You two broke up, right?” Parker asks in a low voice as we head down the hall to the conference room.

“Yes.”

“You think he might help you
relax
?”

That snaps me out of my daze. Earlier in the day Parker had commented on how tense I looked, and I’d confessed my recent trouble “relaxing,” without going into detail. I certainly wasn’t any more or less relaxed when I was with Todd than without him. I’m just in a weird place because of this purported meeting with Dean. The one I keep meaning to cancel but somehow haven’t. The one I know I can’t keep. I can’t go out to Camden to meet a dead sexy ex-convict at his apartment tonight. The very reason I never returned to Riverside, never kept in touch with anyone, was so I wouldn’t get pulled back into that world. Meeting with Dean would be a huge step backward when I have committed so many years to looking anywhere but.

“Rachel. Parker.”

The three partners are already in the conference room when we enter, Don Sterling, Joseph Morgan and Lee Haines. The three men, two white, one black, all dressed in handmade suits and Italian loafers, make a powerful impression when they stand in unison, hands extended. We shake and murmur polite nothings before Parker and I take a seat on the opposite side of the table in front of matching collated and color-coded reports.

God, they’re close to two hundred pages long. Single spaced.

“As you know,” Sterling begins, flipping open his report to page one, “we have twenty-six associates working in thirteen cities in eight states to conduct the interviews for this suit. In nearly a month we’ve collected data on over a thousand victims and we have—” He glances at Morgan and Haines as though it’s necessary to explain the “we,” “concluded that there is, without question, a substantial case here.”

Parker and I studiously avoid each other’s eyes. No kidding, there’s a case here. Meet
one
ravaged family and you’d know there was a case here.

“Now,” Morgan takes over, “you two have been working from a list of preapproved questions and have completed ninety-one interviews. Any observations not included in your reports?”

Parker and I shake our heads. “It’s all in there,” I say for both of us. “Everyone we’ve spoken to has reported similar working conditions, an exposure to the Harco-99 cleaner containing significant amounts of perchlorodibenzene, and similar side effects. To date seventy-nine of our interviews have been with families whose exposure resulted in the death of at least one family member. Twelve have been with those otherwise severely impacted by the exposure.”

“All right, excellent,” Morgan says, tapping his pen against the back of his hand. “As you know, Caitlin and Wallace are in North Carolina, a town called...”

Marlowe
.

“...Marlowe, and in three and a half weeks they’ve completed...”

Ninety-five
.

“One hundred and sixty interviews.”

My eyes nearly bulge out of my head. Next to me, I feel Parker stiffen. We don’t need to look at each other to know we’re thinking the same thing:
Caitlin Dufresne.
That bitch.

“Now,” Haines picks up his report and flips to a blue-tabbed page near the middle. “Caitlin has been reviewing your interview notes—”

“I’m sorry,” I interrupt, “
my
notes?”

“Yes.” Haines nods, big fingers still trying to turn the page, failing to note the suddenly tense set of my shoulders. “And she has been kind enough to make some adjustments to the questions you’re asking, which will hopefully result in an improved interview pace, allowing everyone to catch up to her rate of progress.”

Haines folds his hands in front of him and peers at Parker and me over his gold-framed glasses, apparently waiting for some sort of response.

“That’s very...helpful,” Parker offers in a strange voice.

Haines nods, satisfied. “Yes, we thought so. Now...”

The meeting lasts two hours, but covers nothing new. It’s just another depressing series of minutes in a day of bad news, and not even its tediousness can distract me from my renewed hatred for Caitlin Dufresne. Well,
renewed
might not be the right word. It’s not like my hatred for her ever faded, it had just been shuttled to the background while she worked out of town.

Hired at the same time as Parker and me, Caitlin Dufresne was top of her class at Yale, the only daughter of a bigwig lawyer at a New York firm who had opted to strike out on her own so as not to take advantage of her father’s connections. Eye roll, please. As much as I hate to admit it, if the law hadn’t worked out, she could have been a supermodel. With her long blond hair, huge blue eyes, mile-long legs and breasts that have distracted many a male colleague, Caitlin is gorgeous. She’s also a huge whore. But despite her whorishness, she’s irritatingly smart, devoted to the law, and is always one of the first in and last to leave at the end of the day.

She’s basically a Disney villain, as heartbreakingly beautiful as she is selfish and shallow. Unfortunately for us, she’s very much real and entirely three-dimensional, scaling the ladder at Sterling, Morgan & Haines in four-inch heels and making life miserable for anyone who crosses her path.

While Parker and I had to wait until we were officially fourth-year associates to make the move up to the thirty-second floor, Caitlin is the only person in Sterling, Morgan & Haines’s illustrious history to get a prime location on the upper level at the beginning of her
third
year. This was no doubt helped along by the fact that she’s sleeping with Sterling, Morgan or Haines—or some combination thereof—but the fact remains: we’re equals, but we’re not.

Before setting out on these interviews everyone agreed that we would conduct four interviews a day, six days a week. A hundred and sixty interviews done in three and a half weeks works out to... Seven? Eight, interviews a day? Well, math isn’t my strong suit. But it’s considerably more than we agreed upon, and her motivations have less to do with helping the clients than making herself look good.

Unlike Caitlin, I actually care about these people. More than I should. More than I want to. They remind me of the people I grew up with, the ones I left behind.

Sometimes I think this is the wrong case for me. If I can’t do my job without my emotions getting in the way, then maybe Caitlin, with her coldly ruthless ambition, is the right person, after all. But then I think of her smug face as she jots down notes, thrilled with every gory personal detail because they make her case stronger and not because she cares, and I think, God no. I’m the one who should do this. I can keep my heart and my head separate. I can win this case on its merits, and for the right reasons. I’m not a saint, but I’m a damn good lawyer.

The meeting ends at five to eight, and Parker and I stand and force smiles as we shake hands with the partners and thank them for their time before heading back to my office. Parker goes to grab dinner and I review the report as I wait. Despite the late hour, most of the lights are still on and I can see dozens of people at their desks or on the phone.
See?
I think.
Everybody works this much.
It’s not just me.
Why don’t you tell
them
to relax?

I’m 10 percent through when my cell phone buzzes. I dig it out of my bag and stare at the unfamiliar number. Except I do know whose number it is.

My guilty eyes flicker to the time: eight-oh-three.

Well, he’s certainly a stickler for punctuality.

I hit Ignore and return to the report. A minute later it rings again. Again I hit Ignore. He calls one more time and when I don’t answer, he gives up. A minute later my phone vibrates to indicate I’ve got messages. I look around: no one cares what I’m doing. They’ve got their own problems.

I pick up the phone with suddenly clammy hands and call my voice mail, pressing Play. The first two messages are just hang ups; the last one is short but ominous:
Rachel.
You didn’t bail on me
,
did you?

Coming from another man, with another voice and seventy-five pounds less muscle, it might have sounded sad, even plaintive:
You didn’t bail on me
,
did you?
But coming from Dean it sounds like the message you’d receive from a mafia don:
You didn’t bail on me
,
did you?
Now you sleep with the fishes.

I put away the phone, check my email, wince when I have sixty-four unread messages and get to work while my stomach growls and I wait for Parker to return. I don’t know what I was thinking, contemplating an unnecessary trip out to Camden to meet with Dean and reminisce about old times. They’re in the past for a reason, and that’s exactly where they belong.

* * *

It’s approaching eleven o’clock when Parker and I say goodbye in the elevator. He’s heading down to the underground parking lot to pick up his car, and while he was kind enough to offer me a ride, I’d opted to make the twenty-minute walk home.

I wave goodbye to the security guard and exit the building, the night air washing over me. It’s still warm enough that I shrug out of my suit jacket and carry it under my arm, my black silk tank perfect summer evening wear.
Ha
, I think wryly.
Perfect for walking home alone and collapsing into bed.
Alone.

I feel physically and emotionally drained by the day’s events, frustration at Caitlin’s newest manipulations providing the energy to help me put one foot in front of the other. Nine times out of ten I take a taxi to and from work, but tonight I wave away the lone yellow cab parked at the curb and head down the mostly empty street on foot.

“That’s what you blew me off for?”

The voice comes from just over my left shoulder, and instead of whirling or running, I do the opposite and freeze. I can feel the angry energy pulsing off Dean and I’d like to postpone confronting it for as long as possible. Which is all of three seconds, when his fingers circle my upper arm and turn me to face him before his grip falls away.

We’re bathed in the muted glow of streetlights and neon signs. The overhead light casts shadows around Dean’s dark eyes and in the hollows under his cheekbones, making him look even more menacing. The sweats are still present though the hoodie is absent, replaced by a black T-shirt that strains across his massive chest. His biceps are bigger than my head, his forearms the size of my thighs. I should be smart enough to be afraid, but I’m too tired and frustrated to work up to it.

I’m about to apologize when Dean cuts me off.

“Another fun night at your desk? Paperwork and emails, that satisfy you?”

I should cut to the chase and tell him I’m sorry for blowing him off, but what comes out instead is, “I had to work. How long have you been out here?”

He ignores the question. “Let me see your phone.”

My bag is slung over my shoulder and I cover it with my arm. “No.”

“Is it broken?”

“No.”

“So why couldn’t you extend me the common courtesy of a phone call, Rachel? Tell me you weren’t coming?”

He’s got me there. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I should have called.”

“But you didn’t.”

“That’s right. I didn’t. How long have you been out here, Dean?”

“Long enough.” His eyes comb me from top to bottom, lips twisting in a sneer. “This is you now, huh?”

I sigh. “Obviously.”

“Take off your shoes.”

I stiffen. “What?”

“Take off your shoes. Put that fancy fucking bag on the ground and take your hair out of that goddamn knot. Let me see the girl I used to know.”

“I told you already, she doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Why not? I liked her.”

“Because she was trash!” I try to stifle the words, but it’s too late. They ring around us in the empty night like sirens, alerting everybody to who I used to be. And who I’m not.