The Wrong Answer to Every Question

Chapter 4 The Job Offered

On Monday, I walked into the downtown office like I owned it.

It was a mistake, and I knew it was a mistake, and I did it anyway. The downtown office was all glass and pale wood and the kind of art that looks like it was chosen by someone who was told to buy art. Celia was at the coffee machine when I came in. She looked up, and her face did the thing, the small, specific thing, and I smiled at her.

"Mara," she said.

"Celia."

"I didn't think you'd be in today."

"I needed to drop something off." I held up the drive. "For Nathan."

She looked at the drive. She looked at me. She was pretty, in the way that people who are used to being watched are pretty, and she had always been kind to me, and that was the part I could not forgive.

"About the other night," she said.

"Don't."

"I just want you to know it wasn't planned."

"The fall," I said. "You planned the fall. You planned the summer. You sat in my living room and helped me pick invitations."

She set her cup down. "You don't have to make this ugly."

"No," I said. "I don't."

I walked past her to Nathan's office. Nathan was on the phone. He saw me through the glass and his face did the same thing Celia's had done, and I felt a small, cold flash of something that was not quite triumph.

He hung up. "Mara."

"Nathan."

"Sit down."

"I'll stand."

He looked at the drive in my hand. "What's that?"

"A backup," I said. "Of the Halbrook files. All of them. The originals, the emails, the staffing logs, the incident reports. The things Ardenne deleted and the things we recovered."

Nathan's face did not change, which was how I knew he knew.

"We have copies downtown," he said.

"Yes. But you don't have these. These are the ones with the annotations. The ones with the timeline. The ones that show the deaths were predicted and ignored."

He leaned back. "Mara, I told you to take the weekend."

"I took it."

"And?"

"And I decided I'm not going to deliver a settlement I don't believe in."

"That's not your call."

"No," I said. "It's not. It's Denise Halbrook's call. It's the call of eleven families who buried people in Ardenne facilities. It's the call of the jury that should hear this case. But it's not my call, and it's not yours, and it's certainly not Grant Ardenne's."

Nathan went very still. "What did you say?"

"Grant. The man you sent to call Denise. The man who called her twice and asked about the trial schedule and the experts and the files. I didn't know there was a client relations team. Neither did the directory."

"You're making an accusation."

"I'm making an observation. I'm good at observations. You told me I was difficult because I notice things."

"Mara."

"I'm not going to sue the firm," I said. "I'm not going to go to the bar. I'm not going to make this ugly, because you were my mentor and I know you believe you're doing the right thing. But I am going to give you a choice."

Nathan folded his hands. "What choice?"

"You can take this case to trial. You can put the energy and the resources into it that it deserves, and you can win, and you can settle afterward for what the families are owed. Or you can watch me walk out of this office, and I will take the drive, and I will take the case, and I will take every client who ever trusted me, and I will do it somewhere you can't touch."

"You're an associate. You don't have the standing."

"I have the plaintiffs. I have the evidence. I have the truth. Standing is a technicality."

He looked at me for a long time. I looked back. I had sat in this office for eleven years and taken every correction and every insult and every small, comfortable lie, and it had cost me nothing until it cost me everything.

"You're serious," he said.

"I've never been more serious."

"Where would you even go?"

"I've had an offer," I said.

This was true. I had gotten it that morning, in an email, from a woman named Paula Reyes, who ran a small firm in the Bay Area that specialized in elder law and nursing home a***e. She had been following the Halbrook case. She had read something I wrote. She had said, "If you ever want to do this without someone holding your hand and telling you to be comfortable, call me."

I had called her. She had answered on the second ring.

"What did they offer you?" Nathan asked.

"A job," I said. "And a promise."

"What promise?"

"That I never have to read a room again."

Nathan picked up his phone. He put it down. He looked at the drive in my hand, and I saw, for the first time in eleven years, something I had never seen on his face. It might have been respect. It might have been fear. It was probably a mix.

"Go," he said.

"Go where?"

"To trial. Take the case. I'll talk to the partners."

"And Grant?"

"Grant," Nathan said, "is not my client. And if he called a plaintiff, that's a problem for Ardenne, not for us."

I nodded. I set the drive on his desk.

"You'll need this," I said.

He looked at it. "You could have kept it."

"I could have," I said. "But I'm not Theo. I don't do things in the dark."

I turned and walked out. Celia was still at the coffee machine. She did not look at me, and I did not look at her, and I walked past the glass and the pale wood and the art that someone had been told to buy, and I walked out onto the street, and the wind came off the bay, and I felt lighter than I had in months.

My phone buzzed. Theo.

Theo: I need to know when you're coming to get your things.

I typed back.

Mara: I'll send someone.

Then I put the phone in my bag and walked to the subway, and I thought about the list, and the drive, and the case, and the fact that I had just done the most dangerous thing I had ever done, which was to tell the truth in a room that preferred comfort.

It was not the answer they wanted.

It was the only answer I had.