Leigh didn’t laugh. “You know you’re always front and center with me.”
He said, “That seems like a good note to end on.”
Leigh kept the phone to her ear even after he’d hung up. She let the self-recriminations come to a boil before resting the receiver back in the cradle.
There was a knock on her door. Liz popped in and out quickly, saying, “You’ve got five minutes to get upstairs.”
Leigh went to the closet to find her heels. She freshened up her make-up at the mirror on the inside of the door. BC&M didn’t just spend money on jury consultants for defendants. They wanted to know what jurors thought about their lawyers. Leigh was still haunted by a case she’d lost where her client had gone to prison for eighteen years perhaps because, according to one of the male jurors who’d been polled, Leigh’s pulled-back hair, J. Crew pantsuit and low heels couldn’t hide that she was “obviously a knock-out but needed to make more of an effort to look like a woman.”
“Crap,” she said. She’d put on lipstick when the mask would cover her mouth. She used a Kleenex to wipe it off. She looped on her mask, then stacked together her legal pads and grabbed her phones.
The low din of the cubicle farm enveloped her in white noise as she walked toward the elevators. Leigh looked at her personal phone. Still no text or call from Callie. She tried not to read too much into the silence. It was coming up on four in the afternoon. Callie could be sleeping or stoned or selling drugs on Stewart Avenue or doing whatever it was she did with her endless amounts of time. An absence of communication didn’t necessarily mean that she was in trouble. It just meant she was Callie.
At the elevator, Leigh used her elbow to summon the car. Since her phone was out, she dashed off a text to Maddy—I am a future employer. I check your TikTok. What do I think?
Maddy wrote back immediately—I assume you are a Broadway director and you think, “Wow that woman knows her shit!”
Leigh smiled. The punctuation was a small victory. Her sixteen-year-old baby calling herself a woman who knows her shit was a triumph.
And then her smile dropped, because Maddy’s TikTok was exactly the kind of evidence that Leigh would show a jury if she were trying to impugn her daughter’s character.
The elevator doors slid open. There was another person in the car, a baby lawyer she recognized from one of the lower cubicle farms. Leigh stood on one of the four stickers in each corner that were meant to remind people to keep their distance. A sign above the panel advised no speaking or coughing. Another sign advertised some kind of high-tech coating on the buttons that was supposed to stop viral transmission. Leigh kept her back to baby lawyer, though she heard a gasp when she used her elbow to hit the penthouse button.
The doors rolled closed. Leigh started composing a text to Maddy about college admissions, respect from your co-workers, and the importance of a good reputation. She was trying to think of a way to bring the beauty of sex into the mix without mortifying them both when her phone buzzed with another text.
Nick Wexler was asking—DTF?
Down to fuck.
Leigh sighed. She regretted circling back into Nick’s life again, but she didn’t want to come off as a bitch after asking him for a favor.
She kicked it down the road, writing—raincheck?
A thumbs up and an eggplant rewarded her response.
Leigh contained the urge to sigh again. She returned to Maddy’s text, deciding she would have to climb back onto her high horse at a later date. She replaced the lecture with—Looking forward to talking tonight!
The baby lawyer exited on the tenth floor, but he couldn’t stop himself from glancing back at Leigh, trying to figure out who she was and how she had gained access to the partners’ floor. She waited for the doors to close, then let her mask hang from one ear. She took a deep breath, using the moment alone to recalibrate herself.
This would be Leigh’s first meeting with Andrew after he’d shown his real nature. A duplicitous client was nothing new but, no matter how sadistic their alleged crimes, they were generally docile by the time they made it to Leigh’s doorstep. Suffering the humiliation of arrest, enduring inhumane confinement, being threatened by hardened cons, knowing they could be sent back to jail or prison if Leigh didn’t help them, gave her the upper hand.
That was the warning siren that Leigh had talked herself out of listening to yesterday morning. Andrew Tenant had maintained the upper hand the entire time, and only in retrospect did Leigh realize how it had happened. Defense lawyers always joked that their worst nightmare was an innocent client. Leigh’s worst nightmare was a client who wasn’t scared.