“Yeah.” He sounded relieved. “Yeah, I would. Good call, Skip.”

Dreading a sober walk with Jordan over to The Grill, I told him I needed to run a quick errand and would meet him there. When he arrived, I was already at the bar sipping a martini. I didn’t know how to greet him, but he plunked himself down on the stool next to mine and ordered a drink before even saying hello. We made small talk about his Christmas vacation until the bartender finally gave him his scotch neat.

I waited until he took his first sip. “What happened never happened as far as I’m concerned,” I began. “We never need to talk about it.”

Jordan nodded slowly and then looked up at me. “But what if . . .” He paused. “Can we talk about it?” I nodded gently. “It’s happened three times. But now it’s over.”

“That’s good. I mean, that it’s over. Not that it happened,” I stammered, and we both smiled at my nervous chatter.

“But she still calls me like . . . all the time. It’s a mess. Look, I know I never should have done it. But when it first happened, I hadn’t slept with my wife in like five months. I was losing my mind.”

I coughed as I took a sip of vodka. “Wow. I mean . . . why?”

“She wants a baby. I want to make partner first. She wouldn’t use protection. It turned into a fight every time we were about to have sex, so we just stopped having it. And stopped talking about babies. And finally, stopped talking. And then we were just—”

“Roommates,” I finished his sentence, wondering if Sam and I would still be sleeping together if my guilty conscience wasn’t driving me toward it.

“Roommates,” Jordan confirmed. “But I love her. So much. And I don’t know why I feel the need to wait to bring a kid into the world until I’m fully secure. Maybe because I grew up with no money and around people with money. And I still wake up sweating, feeling like somebody could take it away any second.” He took a long sip of his scotch, leaving only a thin amber layer at the base of his glass. “I’m a shitty person.”

“You’re not.” I meant it. I was certain of it. “If you want to be with your wife, continue to ignore Nancy. She’ll leave you alone eventually. Tell your wife you want to make it work. She doesn’t want a divorce. She wants a baby. And it sounds like you do, too. You can figure it out. Okay?”

He nodded.

“Everybody will be here soon. Are you good? Should we blow everybody off?”

“I’m good. I just want to get really drunk right now.”

“I’m in!” I signaled to the bartender for the bill, then grabbed it before Jordan had a chance. “My treat.”

Jordan watched me sign my name, then took the pen from me and added three letters after my signature.

“Expense this. You’re in the club now,” he said with a smile.

I rolled my eyes. “You don’t need to write ‘esquire’ to expense something. Accounting knows we’re all lawyers.”

“No. But if you write ‘est,’ they’ll know that you work for Matt, and you will never, ever get questioned about an expense, no matter how big, and you’ll get the money in your checking account within forty-eight hours. That’s a t, by the way, not a q.” He pointed at the last letter. “Seriously, I mean, don’t test the boundaries, but I once took five clients to Vegas for a night to watch a fight. It cost about six grand a person, all in. The money was back in my account before we landed the next morning.”

“What does ‘est’ stand for?”

“The partner Matt used to work for invented it like forty years ago. Just means we work the hardest and longest and we should be entitled to the best when we go out. It’s corny, but it’s tradition.”

Even beyond the Miami invitation, and the steady staffing on their deals, this was the moment when I felt completely accepted into their group. Already a little buzzed, I threw my arms around Jordan’s neck, completely unconcerned with the propriety of the gesture.

He patted me on the back. “Easy, Skip. Let’s go get me drunk.”

“Drunkest,” I said with a wink.

The morning light filtered into the bedroom, even though I’d asked Sam to install blackout shades months ago, rousing me painfully from sleep. I winced before I even opened my eyes and then popped them open.

Sam stirred slightly next to me, but I lay perfectly still, my eyes glued to the ceiling, for a few moments before starting my day, a trick I had learned to help combat a hangover.

“What’s going on in there?” Sam asked as I felt him watching me.

“Just thinking,” I said.

“About what?”

My hangover. My colleague’s adulterous relationship. How I’m pathetically obsessed with a man I cheated on you with, who clearly has forgotten I’m alive. “That my head hurts,” I said, and laughed.

“Well, maybe you should drink less.” He turned away from me and pulled up the covers. He’d seemed annoyed after our time together over Christmas had come to an end, but it wasn’t realistic that I could continue working from home, cooking dinner every night, and sleeping with him more than usual to try to deflect my guilt.

“It has nothing to do with how much I drink,” I snapped. “It has to do with the fact that I don’t sleep because the ONE thing I have asked you to do around our apartment has not been done!”

He turned back to me. “What are you talking about?”

“I asked you to install blackout shades months ago!” How could he not find the time to do that? What did he even do all day?

“You mentioned once, at brunch, that we should research brands of blackout shades. That was you asking me to order them and hire somebody to install them?” Sam sat up in bed. “Maybe if you stopped waking up so hungover, you could sleep through the slightest bit of sunlight creeping through.”

He threw off the covers, slid out of bed, and stalked into the bathroom.

“I don’t have a headache because I’m hungover!” As I stared up at the ceiling, though, I knew he was right. I shut my eyes, trying to escape the feeling that I was spinning out of control.

Part V

Breakup

The termination of a deal without closing; typically, a fee is paid by the party failing to follow through with agreed-upon closing terms.

Q. You stated earlier that the nonsexual relationships you described with colleagues evolved from your initial friendly encounters. How, when, and why did these relationships change?

A. Should I focus on my relationship with Gary Kaplan?

Q. No, we’d like to hear a fuller account of the weeks before you matched with a practice group.

Chapter 18

I sat cross-legged on the plush beige textured carpet in my room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, refolding the clothes from my suitcase and putting them in drawers. Carmen lay belly-down on my bed, her elbows pressing into the luxurious mattress as she typed on her phone. Her nails were painted a vibrant pink, and her hair was glossy and full.

“You are looking extra good these days at work, miss,” I told her. She stopped typing and looked over at me, her head cocked to the side, looking slightly confused. “Thank you.”

I took a beat before continuing.

“Are you like . . . seeing somebody at work? Just wondering what’s inspiring you to look so hot lately.”

She blinked twice, gave me a small smile, and looked away. “Nope,” she said, then looked down at her screen and then back at me. “Leave me alone!” she said, laughing, before averting her eyes yet again.

“Shaaaaady,” I sang.

Carmen moved her phone closer to her face. “Derrick missed his flight. He only landed an hour ago.” I glanced at the agenda to see that we had three hours before our welcome meeting. He wouldn’t miss anything. “He’s really out of control these days.”

“Really? How do you know?”

She ignored me. Derrick had been looking increasingly worn since starting work, though it was no surprise, given that he’d assumed the role of client entertainer and seemed to be out with clients at least four nights a week. Jordan had told me a rumor that he was on track to have the largest client development spend at the firm that year, which was absolutely unheard of and totally inappropriate at our level.

“How do you know about Derrick?” I pressed.

“Information just comes to me,” she said. “Like with Derrick’s ex in Bergdorf’s. Like, what are the chances that we met that guy?”

“You didn’t tell anybody about that, right? About Derrick being gay?” I prodded, hoping that word of the private life he kept very close to the vest hadn’t slipped out and somehow caused him to unravel.

“No way. Information is power, but only if not everybody has it,” she said dismissively, eyes still on her phone. I stared at the creature before me, alarmed by her Machiavellian comment, but opted to appreciate her rare display of transparency rather than analyze what it said about her. She finally looked up. “Kevin was just on his way to the pool and saw Derrick checking in. He was upgrading to the presidential suite.”