“Well, c’mon, help me out here, Rambo. Is there anything I can do? What would you do?”
“There’s nothing to do. You can’t make this news disappear. You wanna know what I’d do?” he says. “I’d pray nobody looks me up. Or whatever it was I was doing that relied on my alias—I’d stop doing it.”
No. Stopping is not an option. Not when I’ve gotten this far. Not when I’m so close. November is only six weeks away.
I’ll just to have to pray that I’m not exposed in the next six weeks. If I am, all of this comes crashing down.
36
Friday, September 16, 2022
Married. I’m getting married again! But where?!?
“Paris,” you said. “I always dreamed of getting married in Paris.”
Venice, maybe. Cabo. Maui. Anywhere. I would marry you anywhere, Lauren. I would marry you in a basement. I would marry you in a tub of ice water.
Vicky and I got married in Mexico on a whim. My parents were both gone by then, and Vicky hadn’t seen her parents since she left West Virginia as a teenager, so it’s not like we needed a big family wedding or anything. But still, I’m a homebody at heart, and I always wished we’d married in Chicago.
Vicky. Oh, Vicky. This won’t be easy. I’ll have to find the right way to break this to her. It will be hard, but eventually she’ll see that it’s for the best.
And I don’t have to tell her immediately, do I? After all, I have to wait to file for divorce until November 3—our tenth anniversary—so she gets her share of the money. Maybe that will be the best way to break it to her.
Bad news, we’re splitting up. Good news, here’s ten million dollars.
Yes, it can wait. Everything will be fine. I don’t know why I worry so much.
37
Simon
When I finish with my latest entry, I put the green journal into my work bag, where it always stays. Not exactly something I want other people reading, right?
Anshu pokes his head into my office. “Hey, give me five minutes.”
“Fine.”
Anshu’s taking me out to lunch today. He’d never say so, but he’s trying to cheer me up. Today is Friday, the sixteenth of September, the deadline day for submitting the application for full professorship. He knows the dean asked me not to submit my application, but he doesn’t know what the dean held over me. All Anshu knows is that it bothers me.
Yes, it bothers me, but what bothers me even more is that he can tell it bothers me. I pride myself on not showing my emotions.
“Okay, I’m good.” He walks in with his coat over his arm and bag packed.
“Done for the day?” I ask. “At one o’clock?”
“Well, I figured it might turn into a liquid lunch,” he says. “Hey, it’s a Friday afternoon.”
Yeah, he’s consoling me. Anshu really is a good egg. He’s one of the only people around here I can stomach, one of the only ones who doesn’t take himself too seriously. He is probably one of the top ten tort law professors in the country, but you’d never know it to talk to him. He’d rather talk about his wife and kids or the Cubs, who are currently in the midst of another September nosedive.
“I’m fine,” I say. “Really. I don’t need cheering up.”
“Well, I do,” he says. “I want people who deserve the job. I don’t like people clouting their way into a professorship because of their donor father. This school has enough money already. So help me drown my sorrows, okay?”
How can I say no to that?
“Only if you let me buy,” I say.
“Even better.”
? ? ?
The place is just a walk down from the law school, a block south and near Michigan Avenue, a French place that, according to Anshu, has the best monkfish in the world. I’ve never eaten monkfish and probably won’t start today. I’m looking forward more to the well-stocked bar area after lunch.
“Bindra, party of two,” says Anshu, when we walk in. “Oh, you gotta be kidding me.”
I glance around the room. It doesn’t take me long.
Dean Comstock and his new protégé, Associate Professor Reid Southern, soon to be full professor, sitting in one of the booths, a bottle of champagne on ice by the table.
You have seriously got to be kidding me. They’re celebrating his ascension to full professor, and I have to be in the same fucking room with them? I mean, why doesn’t someone come over and waterboard me while we’re at it?
“We can go somewhere else,” Anshu whispers. “I really don’t care where—”