I made my way over to Didier. “Up,” I ordered, and he enthusiastically cut me a line with his credit card. I remember nothing after that.

I awoke in my apartment to the whisper of running shower water and the sound of Sam clattering around in the bathroom. I was lying on top of the covers, wearing only a pair of black underwear. I felt as though I had been in some sort of accident. I wiped the drool pooling around my lower cheek. I should get up, I told myself, but I couldn’t move.

Sam came out of the bathroom in a cloud of fragrant steam, a towel around his waist.

“Hey,” he said, rubbing his wet hair with another towel. I grunted a good morning as I cursed myself for not being able to remember my first, and probably only, trip on a private plane. I drifted back to sleep.

I opened my eyes again to find myself lying on my stomach, cheek flush against our bed, and Sam standing over me with a mug of coffee in his hand, now fully dressed in jeans, a blue button-down, and a blazer, presumably for a meeting. I closed one eye so I could see him more clearly, then opened both.

“What?”

“How was Miami?” he asked, a challenge in his tone.

“Good. I’m so tired,” I said, closing my eyes again.

“I bet you had fun.” He was angry about something, but I was vacillating wildly between still-drunk and hungover and couldn’t worry too much about what it was. Flashes of deplaning, an Uber SUV, and fiddling with the key in my apartment door bounced around my brain. I remembered tiptoeing into the bedroom and stripping down before falling into bed next to Sam. I didn’t wake him when I came home, I thought. I could pretend the trip was all work. No fun. He couldn’t be mad at me for that.

“Not really. It was a ton of work. I’m exhausted.” I prayed that he would let me go back to sleep and cupped my forehead in my palm, feeling like my brain might explode if I didn’t. “How was work for you while I was gone?” I mentally pleaded with him to focus on anything but how banged-up I must have looked. I breathed into the pillow and caught a whiff of my own breath as I inhaled. It didn’t smell like morning breath. It smelled like vodka. I cringed and began breathing through my nose.

“Good. I need to prepare for the final investors meeting next week. I have to brief everybody on potential VC funding and equity dilution, which is obviously a good discussion to need to have. It’s a really big . . .” I needed to shut my eyes for just a moment, hoping he would simply continue speaking, but he didn’t. I peeled my lids apart to prove to him that I was still listening. He shook his head with a disappointed laugh and walked out of the bedroom.

Just as I was about to close my eyes again, he popped his head back into our bedroom doorway.

“Oh, it says ‘I’m the worst’ with a fairly detailed drawing of a penis and balls in black marker across your back.” With that, he turned and left the room, and I heard the front door close a minute later.

“Shit,” I whispered. Jordan. I let my head sink farther into the pillow. Despite the sensation that a metal rod was splitting the two lobes of my brain apart, I burst out laughing. I put my palms to my abdomen and felt my muscles convulsing, before letting out a large sigh to calm myself.

There was the briefest moment of panic as I wondered if my phone had made it home with me from Miami, but it was responsibly plugged in on my nightstand. I grabbed it and dialed Jordan.

“Skippyyyyyyyyy,” he croaked into the phone.

“Uhhhhh.” We groaned at each other for a few minutes. “You’re an asshole, you know? You drew on my back in permanent marker.”

He paused. “I refuse to apologize for things I have no recollection of doing.”

“It says ‘I’m the worst’ with a picture of a penis across my back.”

Jordan burst out laughing. “Oh my god. I totally remember doing that. I’m sorry, Skip.”

“Sam saw it this morning,” I told him, laughing now too.

“Sucks for you, dude! I have Jessica thinking I worked the whole time.”

“Are you making it in to the office today?” I asked, hoping the answer was no and I could spend the Friday in bed. I knew that there was no way Matt would be making the trek in from Westchester.

“Zero chance. Can you just look at the term sheet Matt sent around this morning?”

“Yup, will do,” I said and hung up. I spent two hours on it before sending it back to Jordan, then stared at my in-box, which was reasonably quiet today. I turned on my side to go back to sleep for a bit, but the adrenaline from the weekend got me up and into the shower. I emerged clean and dizzy from the heat and checked my email again to see that only a few administrative emails from the firm had dripped in. Matt and Jordan had probably gone back to sleep as well.

The day stretched out like an impossibly long blank canvas before me. As I sat on the corner of the bed, I searched the plank wood floors for dust and the ceilings for cobwebs, but saw none. The cleaning lady we had once a week would be in Monday anyway, and she’d also do all my laundry from the Miami trip. Food shopping was pointless because I’d inevitably eat at my desk all week, and Sam liked to buy his own food. I was too hungover for the gym. I opened my phone to review my texts—the first twenty text conversations were all to and from Sam, my parents, and Klasko people. My friends from college hadn’t been in touch in weeks—they had grown tired of my delayed responses. It was just too easy not to respond to people in different cities, especially when their questions weren’t time-sensitive like the ones from work. I breathed in deeply, trying to suppress the uncomfortable feeling that I had no life outside of the office, and refreshed my work email again.

This time, I was relieved to see a few new messages from Matt asking for some follow-up items to send to clients we’d seen and potential clients we’d met in Miami. The tightness in my chest dissipated as I opened my laptop and dove into the tasks at hand, welcoming the calm of purpose and productivity.

Part IV

Attempted Closing

An attempt to conclude the merger process and legally transfer ownership through signing and recording of all documents.

Q. Was your relationship with any of your colleagues ever sexual in nature?

A. [Mr. Abramowitz] That is beyond the scope of the trial. My client’s relationship with Gary Kaplan is the only relevant relationship here.

Q. The question of your actions with clients and colleagues is highly relevant to the scope of the trial and provides valuable insight to the veracity of your accusations as well as motivation for truthfulness or lack thereof.

A. Klasko, like all large law firms, is a high-stress environment. When attorneys aren’t working, they often find outlets for their stress. Often in substances. Sometimes in one another.

Q. Could you please be more specific?

A. My relationships with many of my colleagues changed over the course of my first several months at the firm, be it through regular evolution of a friendship or a rumored sexual relationship or, in one case, an actual one.

Q. Could you please provide some specific examples of the latter two? The rumored sexual relationship and the actual one?

Chapter 14

“Come to the associate happy hour tonight! It’ll be fun!” Carmen stood in my office, arms folded over her chest. I readied my polite excuse. “Free booze! You can’t turn that down.” The firm believed that we needed to know each other personally to work well together, and so our bar tab was picked up each Thursday at the bar across the street to encourage us to get drunk with one another. “Plus, the older associates are really cool. You should meet them! The ones you haven’t already gallivanted around Miami with.” She overshot her attempt at a smile, and bared her teeth ever so slightly for just a moment. I should have told her I was going to Miami, I thought, so she didn’t have to hear it from somebody else.

“I was going to tell you—”

Carmen shook her head to stop me. “I’m happy for you,” she assured me, sounding convincing. “Come tonight!” I found it remarkable how quickly people forgave me when I didn’t apologize. Her placid face no longer betrayed underlying resentment. Perhaps she was angrier that I hadn’t told her than jealous that I’d gone. I watched her, trying to trust her. But on some level, I knew that Carmen was masterful at presenting herself exactly as she intended to.

“I’ll come to the first one in the new year. Seriously, I’ll kick my year off right and start showing up to these things. But we have the holiday party at the end of the week, and I cannot . . .”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Who knows how busy you’ll be next week, let alone next year!”

I pulled up my Outlook calendar and looked up at Carmen with a confirmatory grin. “Fine.”

*