SEAN PINNED BRENNAN’S ARMS OVER HER HEAD AGAINST the wall. His breath was too hot in her ear, and when he bit at her earlobe, she twisted away from his mouth.
“Come on, partner,” he whispered.
Brennan strained to pull her hands down, but Sean had better leverage.
“Don’t,” she said. “Sean…”
He leaned in and ground himself against her hip, his erection a thrill despite the fact that she wasn’t sure that she wanted to have sex with him. But if she didn’t want sex, why did she go to his apartment? Because he called her to say he had good news for her? She needed some good news. It had been two days since Vega told them there was nothing he could do about Silas.
When she’d arrived, Sean led her into his home office, a small nook nestled between his bedroom and his kids’ room. An email sat open on his laptop screen. It was from the chair of the firm to all the partners. The subject read “New Partners” and the text of the message indicated that the executive committee of the firm was supporting two new partners at the next partners’ meeting. Her name was one of the two.
In her elation, she’d wrapped her arms around Sean. He kissed her and pushed her against the wall before lifting her arms over her head.
“You’re going to be a partner,” he said, dropping one hand to a breast.
“They still need to vote.”
“It’s a formality.”
“Still,” she said before managing to drag her hands down against his single arm.
Sean released her and stepped back, grinning like he was running for office. “I get it. I guess you could completely fuck something up and get disbarred in the next month or something.”
Brennan shrugged. She knew bad things constantly happened, but maybe not to people like Sean. He probably had never even sold stock at a loss.
“You okay?” Sean asked.
“Yeah. Just a lot on my mind.”
“I can help you get it off. Or just get you off.” He thought he was so clever.
Brennan could acquiesce and find a few moments of release. She hated her indecision. If she went along, she wouldn’t regret it. Much.
“Actually, can you get me a glass of water?” she asked, stalling.
Even as he turned away, she realized she’d decided to fuck him, but she needed his grin to be somewhere else. If she leaned over his desk, she wouldn’t have to look at his face.
She faced his desk and dropped a hand between her legs to expedite matters. She knew the reaction he’d have when he returned to find her there, underwear around one ankle, skirt hiked up.
His laptop was still open, and she admitted to herself that the email excited her. The fact that he shared these secret things with her aroused her. Her gaze drifted aimlessly around his desk as she rubbed herself. Scrawled notes about some case on a legal pad. A credit card bill for $15,863.98. A pile of unopened junk mail. A page with Reliant Tires letterhead poking out from a manila folder. Something from their trial. She hadn’t liked her client or their case, but she loved winning.
Brennan lifted the edge of the folder with the hand that wasn’t occupied with herself. She didn’t remember the document. It was a memorandum to the CEO. She stopped touching herself. The subject line read: “Tire redesign cost savings and risks.” She pulled her underwear up as she read. She wanted to take a picture of it with her phone, but it was in her bag, two rooms away on his couch. Before she could do anything, Sean turned into the office with her glass of water. Brennan spun around, memo in her hand.
“What is this?”
Sean’s smile disappeared like it had never been there. Then he blinked and the smile was back like it had never been gone.
“That’s a memo,” he said, holding the glass of water out to her.
“I never saw it before.”
“You didn’t need to. Why were you going through my things?”
“Why do you have this?”
“You going to take this water or not?” When she didn’t move, he reached past her to place it at the edge of the desk.
“Sean.” She sounded like she was about to cry. Her mother had taught her that she should keep her composure no matter what—it was the one thing she had control over. “Who else knew?” she demanded.
“Just pretend that you didn’t see it. Okay? It’s no big deal.”
“I have to report this!”
“Do you?” Still smiling.
“I have ethical obligations. We have ethical obligations! How could you do this?”
Sean laughed at her. “This? This is where you’re drawing the line? Bren, you’re fucking a married man. Your boss. Because you wanted to make partner. And you’re worried about a piece of paper?”
“We took an oath.”
“Do you even remember it? Come on, this is…You never did anything like this? Bury a piece of inconvenient evidence? Decide something wasn’t Brady because it wasn’t ‘material’?”
Brennan shook her head. Whatever her failings, she clung to her professional ethics. Society literally depended on people like her doing so, regardless of how fucked up their personal lives were. And hers was colossally fucked. She loved Sean because he had no redeeming qualities. She deserved someone as awful as him, but she couldn’t sink to this level. Even as that thought crystallized, the rest of it played out in her mind. As he watched her think through the outcomes, Sean’s smile brightened until it was unbearable in the small room.
“See? You understand. We were a team on that trial. You think people will believe you didn’t know about this, too?”
“I didn’t.”
Sean shrugged. “What will I say, though? Don’t make me do this, Bren. You report me, I’ll say you were in on it, that you decided to report me because I wouldn’t leave my wife for you. There’s plenty of evidence that we were fucking.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
Sean’s grin widened until it looked like the top of his head might slide off. “You’re literally holding evidence that I would do exactly that. Anything to win, Bren. That case made me. Made us. You had everything riding on that case. They’ll throw us both out of the firm.”
Sometimes when Brennan read about a plane crash, she thought about the terror of plummeting thirty thousand feet knowing not only what the ground meant, but that it took time to fall that far. This was the closest she’d ever been to approximating that horror. All she had to do was agree to keep her mouth shut. She kept so many secrets for so many people. What was another one for herself?
“I can’t let this slide, Sean.”
His smile dimmed like a cloud passed in front of it. “It will ruin my life.”
“I didn’t do that.”
“You’re choosing to do it now!”
“It’s not a choice.”
“My kids, Bren. My family.”
“Now you want me to think about them?”
“You weren’t hurting them before.”
Hadn’t she been? She didn’t know. It was irrelevant.
She started toward the door, but Sean was in her way. He reached out and placed a palm against her shoulder. The room was so small, even that movement backed her up against his desk. “I can’t let you leave with that document.”
“You’re going to assault me?”
Sean didn’t move. “You can’t take that with you. I’ll take it from you if I have to. Just put it on the desk. If it will make you feel better, you can pretend that I tore it out of your hands.”
She wanted to believe that she could fight her way past him. Would she feel more helpless if he physically subdued her or if she surrendered without striking out? Had Jess made the same type of calculation thirty years ago?
“There were no good options, Bren. You should get right with that. The good news is that your best bad option is you get to become a partner. Go on with your career. Make your money.”
He was right. Once he had the memo, he’d destroy it. Any accusation would be her word against his. She’d ruin both their careers at best. Worst case, she’d look like a crazy, jilted lover, and he’d skate. She knew how she’d advise someone else in her situation.
“How do I know you won’t fuck me over at the partners’ meeting?” she asked.
“I’ve been singing your praises for two years now. It might raise some eyebrows if I suddenly started saying you shouldn’t be a partner. Like I said, it’s a done deal.”
She handed him the memo. “Why didn’t you just shred it?”
Sean shrugged. “I don’t know.” His finger floated across her cheek light as a ghost, wiping a tear she hadn’t felt run from her eye. “I guess I just liked having it.”
#
Brennan avoided crying more during the cab ride back to her apartment. Her mother would have been ashamed that she cried at all. If her mother wasn’t incapacitated, she would have raged at her about how she was to blame for putting herself in that room. She was like her father. Whatever Sean had done, Brennan wouldn’t have been involved if she hadn’t been fucking him.
She dropped her bags on her couch and went into her office. She sat at her father’s desk—her desk. Maybe he would have known what to do. He would have understood, at least.
She couldn’t ask any friends—she’d be exposing her attorney friends for the same reason she was hung out: There was an obligation to report ethical lapses, and the failure to do so was itself a violation. And if she told someone, she’d have to admit everything she’d been complicit in, at least the affair, and if she didn’t report Sean’s burying of evidence, that, too.
She stared at the empty surface of the desk. There were no answers there.
Frankly, the plaintiffs would likely recover something eventually—appeals and other suits were pending. There’d be a settlement. The attorneys would get paid cash, but the people who bought those tires would get a twenty-dollar coupon for new tires. Sean hiding that memo probably cost them another ten dollars on their coupons.
She opened the middle drawer in the right pedestal of the desk and pulled out a few sheets of stationery. She grabbed her father’s good pen from the pencil drawer directly over her lap. As she shut the drawer, it clipped the edge of the pen, spinning it from her fingers. It fell and bounced off the top of her foot, skittering underneath her desk. She crawled underneath the desk to retrieve it. Maybe she would die down there. The pen was deep in the foot well, against the backboard. She shuffled forward on her hands and knees and grabbed the pen. She started to back out, but her blouse snagged on something.
She rolled her eyes—she couldn’t even get in and out from underneath her desk—and twisted her head to see if she could see where the snag was. The side of the right pedestal caught her eye. Just behind the pencil drawer, there was a gap in the wood. Brennan looked left—there was no corresponding feature on the left pedestal.
She freed her blouse from the spur on the underside of the pencil drawer, then twisted onto her left elbow so she could get a better look at the pedestal. The gap was from a small piece of wood—a latch—that would slide into a space hidden by the pencil drawer’s rails.
She realized she could have reached out underneath the desk with a little stretch and touched the latch if she had known it was there. But unless she was under the desk, with the pencil drawer open as it was now, and looking up, the feature would be invisible.
She ran her fingers over the wood. The latch slid with some pressure and revealed a fingerhold behind it. Brennan inserted her finger and gave a little tug. It was a secret drawer, a novelty designed to hide documents like a deed or a will. Brennan flipped over to her back so she could pull until it came loose into her hands. Paper shifted in the drawer in minute tremors as it stacked against the front end.
After she was out from under the desk, Brennan sat up on her floor with the drawer in her lap. It was lined with green felt and held sheets of heavyweight paper stacked about two inches deep. The topmost page was a handwritten letter in close block print in black ink. The letter was addressed Dear J—. The text ended halfway down the page. It was unsigned, but Brennan knew who wrote it.
She reached out like she was checking a body and touched the page just below the text. The paper felt fresh, which surprised her considering that it was at least thirty years old. She slid the page until a sliver of the sheet underneath showed. The top page and edges of the stack had yellowed almost imperceptibly compared with the white of the pages protected from the air. The drawer had protected the pages well.
She grazed the text with the tip of her finger like she was brushing an eyelash off a cheek. It was as close to touching her father as she had come in thirty years. This wasn’t simply some object he owned like her desk—these were his thoughts, his labor in moving the pen across the paper. Other than her and her brother, these pages were the closest thing to him in the entire world. His fingerprints were probably still on the pages. His DNA.
Brennan pushed the drawer farther down her lap so her tears wouldn’t drop onto the pages. Through blurred eyes, she read the top page.
Dear J—,
I don’t know how to find a way out of this. I can’t sleep anymore. I don’t see a future where we’re together, and I can’t bear it. It’s empty, and no matter what I try to do to fill it with something that gives me hope, it comes to nothing. It’s like I’m a contractor trying to build a house on sand from plans I can’t see. Brennan…
She stopped reading and sobbed until she was numb. She remembered the way her father said her name. Seeing it on the page in his writing was like hearing his voice in the room. She glanced at the page again. Brennan. She squeezed her eyes shut.
When she knew she wouldn’t weep again, she wiped her hands on her skirt and quickly leafed through the pages by one corner without removing them from the drawer. She needed to preserve them and their order.
They all appeared to be letters, addressed to J—. Some were a few sentences on a page, others were multiple pages long. About a dozen of them were dated. Without reading the letters, she couldn’t discern if there was any significance to the dated ones other than that they were in reverse chronological order—the dates went back in time as she flipped toward the bottom of the stack. Her father probably laid each new page on top of the prior one, but she couldn’t be sure. Brennan estimated there were more than one hundred letters in the drawer. If there were a thousand, she would have wanted more.
At the bottom of the stack, separated from the others by a blank page, was a page without any writing. Colored pencil. She lifted the stack briefly to reveal a child’s drawing. She didn’t remember it, but recognized it as hers, a picture of her father.
She covered it with the letters as he had left it. She didn’t cry again, not because she wasn’t moved, but because she couldn’t process everything she felt in the moment.
She left the papers in the drawer and slid it back into its place under the desk. Now that she knew it was there, she saw how easy it would be to slide it in and out while sitting at the desk.
She picked up her phone to call Hunter, but it was 3:00 a.m. She thought about calling him anyway, but decided against it and went to bed. She woke, face buried between her pillows against the morning light, her phone ringing on her nightstand. When she answered, her mother’s home health aide told her she needed to come to the apartment, and quickly.