“What did he do to you?” I whispered.

She smoothed a few red-gold strands away from her perspiring brow and looked me dead in the eyes for a long, pregnant moment. “I can’t,” she finally whispered, taking out the personal NDA for Gary R. Kaplan with which I was all too familiar, the firm’s red letterhead shouting from the top of the page.

“NDAs can’t prevent somebody from reporting a crime,” I assured her. “They’re null.”

She straightened slightly. “I’m not sure it is a crime. I go willingly. I sign up for it.”

“Well, you can tell me. Consider it attorney-client privilege,” I told her. Please don’t point out that Gary is actually my client in this scenario.

She doubled over again in a wave of pain, and I placed my hand over hers. She flipped her palm and squeezed mine tightly until it passed.

“I think I need a doctor,” she said quietly. Her eyes focused and unfocused, and before I even knew what was happening, I was in a cab with her to Lenox Hill Hospital.

I had never taken somebody to the emergency room before, and though I tried my best to fill out the forms, she was so delirious with pain that I didn’t trust most of her answers. According to her Miami driver’s license, she was Kristen Molloy. According to her, she was allergic to all pain meds. “Except morphine,” she added with a laugh. I erred on the side of caution and wrote “might be allergic to pain meds.” I felt like I was watching myself from outer space as I argued with the nurse at the front desk, then moved on to a physician’s assistant, who took one look at her and ushered us into a room with a promise he’d be back with a doctor as soon as possible. I propped Kristen up in front of me and gently removed her blue wrap from her shoulders and began to undo her white button-down so she could put on the robe the PA had provided. As her shirt fell slowly open, her alabaster skin darkened down her torso into angry shades of red and black. I felt tears spilling out over my cheeks despite my attempt to be stoic.

As soon as her top was off, she turned her back to me, and I had to shut my eyes for a moment. Her back was a collage of patchwork violence. I couldn’t imagine which instruments made most of the marks, but there had to have been belts or whips involved. I took in the scratch marks, bloody and raw, and the bite marks up by her shoulder. I held open the robe as she eased her arms through the armholes, and she turned back to me as she pulled the two sides of the robe across her chest.

“I don’t have insurance,” she said.

“Don’t worry. I got it.” I could barely get the words out through my tears.

The PA returned with a tall, balding physician, both of their expressions serious.

“Are you family?” the doctor asked.

I shook my head, and they politely asked me to wait outside, though I could still make out most of what they were saying through the thin curtain forming her ER “room.” She adamantly refused a rape kit. Her breast implant had somehow been flipped. “He kicked it,” she kept repeating. There was a flutter of movement, and from what I could gather from the whispers, she had tried to stand and fallen slightly. I could hear her yelling for them to take their hands off her, when I assumed they were trying to help. Then there was silence. Then crying. I plugged my ears with my fingers and sank to the floor.

As soon as the doctor left, I slipped back in to find Kristen getting dressed.

“You’re finished?” I asked, though I knew she couldn’t have been.

“Thanks so much,” she said, avoiding my eyes as she did.

“Where are you headed now?” I asked.

“Home,” she said with a shrug. “I just email his assistant to say when I want the plane to be ready. And I guess they ask you to get us the car. But that didn’t happen this time. So, I’ll cab it to LaGuardia.” She sounded angry with me, rather than with the man who’d beaten her black and blue.

“You’ve done this before?” I asked, looking at her in disbelief.

Her sharp gaze pierced through any notion I’d had of being a hero. “Don’t look at me like some victim. He pays us twenty-five g’s to beat the shit out of us. He just got out of control this time. No matter how many times I screamed our safe word, he just kept hitting and hitting and hitting . . .” Her voice trailed off as her brain seemed to go to some dark place, and then retreat from it. “It happens. I’ll definitely pay you back for the hospital bill. I just need a little time.”

I shook my head. “Us?”

“He flies us up from Miami. Because we don’t know people here, I guess.”

“But . . . how? I mean . . . where? Where is his wife during all of this?”

“I don’t know. I assume somewhere else? Not like we hang out at his apartment. He has a whole separate entrance for us. A separate space. Just four walls and some beds and . . . contraptions.” She shuddered, seeing something in her mind that terrified her. “Look, I have a kid. I’m too old to model anymore. I do what I have to. We all do.”

“So you’re just going to let him do this? You’re going to let him get away with it?” I couldn’t believe I was yelling at her, a woman who had just taken the beating of her life, but the words came before I knew it.

She took a few cautious steps toward me and bent her impossibly long legs to bring her face level with mine. “You don’t get it. He is a monster,” she hissed at me before taking a step back, menace in her tone. “This is nothing compared to what he could do to me. To my family.”

Her words were an echo of what Gary had said the night of The Incident. She won’t talk. The Incident flooded back to me. I heard their laughter and my screams. I recalled how I had trusted his words, his power to ruin me. I nodded at her slowly, empathetically.

I stepped to the side to leave her to fill out her discharge paperwork. What other option did I have?

Still standing in the emergency room, I took out my cell phone and called Carmen’s office line. She picked it up right away with a “Hey.”

“Hey. Did you go to management?”

“Yeah,” she said, her tone hard to read.

“And?” I asked.

“And . . . I think I’m going to take some time away from Klasko. From BigLaw, actually,” she said quietly. They offered her money to sign an NDA, I thought. Those assholes. And Peter was just going about his business, enabling Gary Kaplan’s monstrous violence.

“Did you sign anything yet?”

“Alex . . . I can’t talk about it.”

“Carmen! Did you? Don’t say anything if you haven’t signed it yet.” I waited a full five seconds. “Good. Don’t sign anything. I have a plan.”

I walked back into the lobby just as my colleagues were returning from their long lunches at Wolfgang’s and The Grill. As soon as I sat down at my desk, I immediately emailed Matt and Jordan and asked them to come to my office. I sat in my chair and stared at the open door, biting at the callus on my thumb as the unread emails stacked up in my in-box. When they appeared in my doorway, I motioned for them to close my door.

“I’ve got a dead-body situation,” I said to them as soon as they sat, taking a tissue and wrapping my thumb in it, now bloody from where I’d bitten my cuticle. “I think I need help.” I wasn’t fully certain I’d ever uttered that phrase before.

“What have you gotten yourself into, Skippy?” Matt’s tone was calm, measured, and I understood immediately why people wanted him as their attorney.

I stopped fighting the tears that streamed down my cheeks. “There is a laundry list of very screwed-up shit happening to women at this firm. Peter Dunn, who is not even the worst part, has had sex with both Carmen and with me,” I said, spitting the words out as though they were poison. I tried to ignore their facial expressions, which seemed to freeze in shock and then melt in disappointment, and forced myself to continue. “The most egregious, possibly criminal act with which the firm is involved is the facilitation of Gary Kaplan beating women half to death by arming him with airtight NDAs prior to engaging in such activity. We then call cars for the bruised and beaten women, from our own car service, to take them to the airport. I just met one of the women. She was all messed up.”

I paused. They were staring at me, looking uncertain whether I was serious.

Finally Jordan cleared his throat and forced a half smile. “I had my money on you being way too deep into a coke habit.”

Matt ignored him as he squinted, trying to make sense of it all. “I assume you can prove this Gary thing?”

I shrugged. “Well, I guess there’s enough evidence with the cars. And I’m not trying to prove this in a court of law. I just want the firm to stop it. I have enough to prove to Mike Baccard that it’s happening.”

“And Carmen? Is she willing to speak?” Matt asked.

“She already did.”

Matt leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head, ready to analyze all the angles of the situation, then dropped his hands and straightened his tie, preparing for battle. “Okay, Skip. What do you need from me?”