JENNA CLIMBED ONTO THE BARSTOOL NEXT TO HUNTER AS the Mets blew a lead in the ninth. She’d cut her hair to shoulder length since the funeral.
“Can I buy you a drink?” he asked.
She smiled. “I don’t think I’ve ever turned one down before.”
Hunter called the order down to the bartender.
“They’re blowing another one, huh?” Jenna asked.
“Yeah. We got that in common.”
“Don’t beat yourself up, kid. Some people are born losers.”
“Okay, relax.” He laughed. “Seriously, I wanted to thank you for coming to my mom’s funeral. It meant a lot to me.”
Jenna took the beer from the bartender’s hand. “Yeah, of course. I know…I can’t imagine. I care. I wanted you to know that.”
Hunter nodded and took a sip of his beer.
“I got an assignment.”
“Oh? Where?”
“Pakistan.”
“That’s far.” She looked up at the game.
“Yeah.” Hunter faced her until she turned back to him. “My sister and I, we found a bunch of letters my dad wrote. It’s a long story, and I’ll tell you later, but I’ve been reading them. Thinking about him. My mom. My life.”
“Hunter—”
“Please, just listen? This won’t take long. My whole life, I thought that I was doing something different from him. Not making the same mistakes he did. But I was running. Like him. I ran from my family, and we lost so much time. I ran from you.”
Jenna sighed. “Look, if you’re just telling me this so I’ll understand, so I’ll forgive you for not giving us a chance…I mean…I get it. I got it. We were done. You didn’t need—”
“I didn’t take the assignment.”
Questions ran across Jenna’s face, but she didn’t ask them.
“I turned it down,” Hunter explained. “I’m staying here. It’s the first step, right? When you’re lost? Stay where you are.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I’ll find another beat. Something here.”
“Good for you. I’m still leaving.”
“Yeah. I know. You should. I would never stop you. This opportunity is amazing. But I want to stop running from things that might hurt me. We still have a few months to figure this out, right? If you’ll give me a chance. If you’ll forgive me.”
Jenna slid off her stool and wrapped her arms around him. She kissed his neck and then stood back.
“You know I might break your heart, right?”
Hunter nodded. “Maybe. But not like the Mets, right?”
#
The only woman on the executive committee of Brennan’s firm was Denise Morgan. She was one of three Black partners, and the only woman among them. Denise practiced in the capital markets group, so Brennan never worked with her, although they had chatted at cocktail parties and firm lunches before. Denise was the final interview before Brennan was invited to join the firm out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Still, Brennan half expected her not to recognize her when she knocked on her door.
“Brennan?” Denise waved her in. Brennan shut the door as she entered.
“I need a few minutes of your time. It’s important.”
Denise glanced at the envelope in Brennan’s hand before waving a hand at one of her visitor’s chairs. As Brennan sat, Denise pushed a pile of paper to the side so she could fold her hands on her desk.
“Denise—”
“Before you say anything, Brennan, you need to know we’re going to elect you partner in two weeks. Do not, I repeat, do not tell me anything that’s going to fuck that up. We don’t have enough woman partners, much less women of color.”
Brennan smirked.
“You’re not going to like this, then.”
#
“I can’t believe that this is where you live,” Brennan said, walking through Hunter’s apartment. She stopped near an open window. A May breeze flowed through, hinting at summer and rustling her hair. “Your view sucks.”
Hunter laughed from the other side of the island counter separating his kitchen from the living room. “The view from the bedroom is worse.”
She turned and leaned against the wall. “We should eat at my place. At least we’d be able to sit down.”
“Come on. Stop giving me shit. I’m trying to cook here.”
“Looks like you’re just throwing garlic around your kitchen.”
Brennan turned to regard the picture of her and her mother on Hunter’s wall. Her chest squeezed. The other photo from that day—the one their mother framed—now hung in Brennan’s apartment. She reached out to straighten the frame on the wall. She grabbed Hunter’s beer off his table and carried it to where he stood at the stove scraping garlic off a cutting board into a pan of oil. He jumped back as the garlic sizzled and popped off the pan.
“You’re not inspiring me with confidence here. You should just give up.”
“Jenna’s coming over so you two can meet. I gotta finish this.”
“Jesus Christ, Hunter. We could have done it at my place.”
“I wasn’t going to invite myself to have a dinner party at your place.”
Hunter grabbed a bowl of cut chicken and added it to the pan.
“I’d stand back,” he said.
Brennan took an exaggerated step away, and Hunter flicked the pan, tossing the chicken in the air. A couple of pieces missed the pan and fell to the stovetop.
“You got a couple of runners there,” Brennan said.
“Fuck ’em. But speaking of runners, did you see McCarthy dropped out of the race?”
“I saw the headline.” Walter’s arrest by Vega and Bauman and the ensuing stories brought the buried handprint to light. McCarthy had tried for a week to bluster his way past it, but the donors abandoned him in droves after Bauman went public that McCarthy had “tried” to get him to intimidate the siblings. As they agreed when they handed the evidence over, the siblings said nothing to reporters who called except, “We hope Jessica, our father, and everyone else gets the justice they deserve.”
As Hunter added some white pepper to the pan, he asked, “How’d it go today?”
“I made it. Denise pushed me through.”
“What’s going to happen to Sean?”
“He’s been asked to resign.”
“That’s good, right?”
Brennan shrugged. “He’ll land someplace else. They always do. It’d be different if they could have done something about that memo he hid. I get it. But still.”
It ate at her. After Brennan reported the situation to Denise, there’d been a series of urgent meetings. Ultimately Denise came to her office to say that she would still be made partner and Sean would resign, but Denise didn’t have the support to report Sean to the bar without evidence. Denise told her that she would support her decision to report him anyway, but left after saying, “I’m begging you. Don’t throw your career away over this. You can do a lot of good here.”
“I’m thinking it’s time for me to get a new desk,” Brennan said. “For my place.”
“What about Dad’s?”
“I don’t know. Sell it, I guess? It makes me sad now. Looking at it. It’s time I stopped…There’s so much that I did, to be like him, try to prove he was a good guy. The father I wanted to remember. Maybe, one day, I’ll get back there, despite who he really was. Or, better yet, for who he was. But first, I have to be someone more than his daughter.”
Hunter scraped the chicken from the pan into a clean bowl and turned the burner off. He left the kitchen, pulling Brennan’s hand so she’d follow. He led her through the living room to his bedroom, where his bed and a single nightstand seemed adrift on the otherwise-empty floor. Hunter pointed to a corner.
“You think it will fit?”
“You could fit a van in here. You really want it?”
“It’s not only about him. If it were, I wouldn’t want it. There’s two parts to it. The part that’s about him, having that desk here will remind me to reconcile how much I inherited from him, how I’m different. It’ll remind me of the mistakes he made so I don’t have to repeat them.”
“What’s the part that’s not about him?”
“It was your desk, too. Longer than it was ever his.”
Before she could get too sentimental about it, he grinned. “And, I mean, it has a secret drawer.”