The door to the office next to Nora’s was closed, which was just as well because laughter tended to irritate Louis Lambert. It also seemed to Nora that he kept it closed because her very existence pissed him off. Lambert was a formal man—she once addressed him as “Lou” and was met with an icy “My name is Louis.” It didn’t help that he thought she stole his job. Lambert was twenty years older and had been the deputy general counsel at Saugatuck since Nora was in high school. He’d repeatedly demonstrated his mastery of all legal aspects of the financial management business and his devotion to the company. He should’ve been promoted to general counsel when Nora’s predecessor was hired—also from outside the firm—but at least that guy came from the finance industry and knew the actual work. Nora had put mobsters in jail—certainly worthwhile, but she hadn’t demonstrated competence in the business they were actually engaged in, something he found frustrating. He believed he’d been passed over because he was a White man and she had been hired because she was a woman and the firm was attempting to show more diversity to its institutional clients.
Nora knew all this because Lambert came into her office on her first day and told her these things, in precisely those words. He explained that he believed strongly in the culture of truth and felt duty bound to tell her she was an unqualified token hire. It wasn’t personal, he assured her, but he didn’t want to be less than fully candid with her.
Nora remembered the waves of anger, embarrassment, and fear that took turns washing over her as this balding middle-aged man with a flannel shirt tucked into his belted jeans stood in her doorway and delivered his “truth.” She was actually quite proud that she showed no reaction. In the awkward silence that followed, she could think of nothing to do except tell the first lie of her Saugatuck career. “I look forward to working with you,” she said as he turned to enter his office next door. And you can stick your transparency up your petty little butt.
Of course, what Louis Lambert didn’t know was that Nora actually got the job through family connections. Sophie’s new stepmom, Vicki, was the daughter of one of David Jepson’s oldest friends and earliest investors. That’s what got Nora in the door, where she met Helen Carmichael, who knew she needed a talented prosecutor to take over a sensitive internal investigation. Lambert didn’t know any of that.
The real reasons behind her hiring did nothing to reduce Nora’s imposter complex. So she treated that disease herself by reading Investing for Dummies and listening to hours of company meeting tapes. She quickly became fluent in the language of finance and the Saugatuck culture. Nora had devoted her early legal career to a government-run system designed to find truth through the collision of viewpoints in an adversarial environment. Could a company really strip away all the usual hierarchies of money, power, age, gender, or race and arrive at the best answer entirely through logic, persuasion, and consensus? She didn’t know, but was excited to find out, despite Louis Lambert icing her on her first day.