26-APR
After that, they didn’t see Katherine. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t there. She became like a ghost, haunting them. She loomed all the larger in their imaginations because she had all at once become so intangible. Incorporeal. Ferreted away. A blank space to fill with perceived motivations, backstory, and cunning. In the absence of her, they questioned their judgment. They questioned themselves.
The depositions began, it having been several days since Sloane last heard from the detectives without any hint as to where the investigation stood.
Sloane, Grace, and Ardie had hired Helen Yeh from Scott, Wasserstein, and McKenna. Really, Sloane had called in a favor. Sloane had hooked Helen’s son up with an internship at Jaxon Brockwell a year ago and he was now starting his first year at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. From the start, Helen had agreed to take the case on contingency, which meant that if they’d won anything, she would take home 40 percent. They didn’t have to pay a dime up front, though it was quickly starting to look like there wouldn’t be a dime to take home, either, and Helen was probably starting to wonder how much her son’s legal education was really worth to her.
Truviv’s strategy, it appeared, was to methodically chip away at the women’s credibility—mostly Sloane’s. To make their claims sound hypersensitive. To draw as clear a line as possible from the spreadsheet, to the lawsuit, to Ames’s death. Hours passed, punctuated by lukewarm coffee drawn from a stationed carafe, during which Sloane had to watch every word that came out of her mouth. In the late afternoon, they broke for the day and Sloane, Ardie, and Grace reconvened at one of the many salad shops that populated downtown Dallas. During those meetings, Sloane attempted to fortify morale. She went over the line of questioning—the affair was irrelevant, Grace’s note was written under pressure, which could actually be read as a point for them. They’d been responsible, longstanding employees with a knockout record of loyalty to the company.
But there was no easiness to this time spent together and anyway, Sloane’s tone gave her away. A dull edge of hurt still pressed on her that Ardie would complain about her. Was Sloane someone about whom people complained? She worried. She worried Derek was preparing to leave her. (What was he doing all those hours up in the guest bedroom alone?) She worried she would lose her job.
Still. “How can they say that something we did made Ames kill himself?” Sloane would say over an unappreciated mix of purple lettuce and goat cheese.
But then the conversation always returned to Katherine.