BOARDROOM ENEMIES BEDROOM LOVERS

Chapter 3: 30 Days in Hell

One desk, one office, thirty 30 days, and exactly one rule I gave myself the very first morning and broke by the second week: “do not fall for the enemy”.

The office they assigned us for mediation sat on the fortieth floor, glass-walled like everything else in Roman’s world so that the twenty or so associates and paralegals stationed outside could watch us like we were a nature documentary neither of us had agreed to.

Why is there one desk? I asked on day one, standing in the doorway with a box of case files against my hip, staring at the single enormous mahogany slab positioned dead center in the room. Budget cuts, Roman said without looking up from his laptop.

Liar!

He glanced up, then the ghost of a smile pulling at his mouth. Sit down, we have a lot of ground to cover. Twelve hours a day reviewing contracts until the words blurred. Arguing over clauses until our voices carried through the glass and drew stares from the associates outside, by nine o’clock on the first night I fell asleep sitting up, my cheek pressed against a stack of employment contracts.

I woke at two in the morning with his suit jacket draped over my shoulders; he was gone. The office light was dimmed, and the jacket smelled like him- cedar- and sat there in the dark for several minutes longer than necessary, breathing it in before I made myself take it off.

By day seven we were screaming at each other over a severance clause, the kind of shouting match that had three paralegals outside pretending very hard to be busy with paperwork.

It's illegal, Roman.

It's business, Miss Vance.

He stood, paced the length of the office, his shirt pulling tight across his shoulders in a way I refused to notice. You want to save the world? Then join a charity. This is contract law; people get hurt in contract law; that doesn't make it a crime.

This is people's lives!

He stopped pacing for a moment. You think I do not know; before I could answer, his phone rang. He glanced at the screen, jaw tightening, and walked out without a word. I told myself I wasn't going to snoop. I told myself that approximately four seconds before I opened his desk drawer looking for a pen and found instead another photograph tucked beneath a stack of business cards.

My father, maybe thirty-five years old, laughing at something out of the frame, his arm slung around the shoulders of a boy who couldn't have been older than twelve; the boy had gray eyes then, even. On the back in handwriting I didn't recognize, “to my little partner, Uncle Desmond.”

Uncle.

I sat with that word for a long time after Roman came back, turning it over like a stone, and I didn't ask him about it. Some part of me was afraid of what the answer would cost me. On day fifteen we found something almost like a rhythm less shouting, more silence that didn't feel like a war.

Why law? To stop men like you, I said, though it came out softer than I intended. And if men like me are occasionally right? I didn't have an answer to that; I do not, if I'm honest. He walked me to my car that night through a light rain that turned the parking garage lights into halos. Goodnight, Imogen, he said, and it took me a full three seconds to realize what he’d called me.

You called me Imogen?

Yes, I did.

He looked at me, unguarded in his expression that I hadn't seen since the boardroom. Good night, Imogen, he said again, like he meant it this time, and I drove home with my hands shaking on the wheels for reasons that had nothing to do with the rain.

Day thirty arrived faster than I was ready for it. We signed the settlement in near silence, clean terms, terms neither of us had believed possible thirty days earlier. That's it, Roman said, setting down the pen. That's it, I echoed. Thank you. He said quietly, not quite meeting my eyes for doing this the right way. I nodded; I couldn't trust my voice not to betray me.

I turned to leave. Wait! Holding out a file I’d forgotten on the desk, our fingers brushed as I took it, barely just a fraction of a second, and something electric shot up my arms that had absolutely nothing to do with static.