Chapter 4

"H e bought you a sandwich?"

I nodded as I typed, but then I realized that my sister couldn't see the movement. "This is the second time.Today, he got a delivery," I explained.I had watched the woman come to our floor with the big bag of stuff and part of what had been in it was for me. "It was a turkey, avocado, and cheese sandwich on whole wheat and he said the bread was real whole wheat, whatever that means, and also sugar-free. It was mayo-free, too, but it was still good. And he relaxed slightly and said pretzels were ok on the side, as long as they were unsalted. That's more like eating sticks, but at least you get the crunch."

"But when we were making the food for Mom's baby shower, you told us all that you hate your boss," Addie reminded me. "You had plenty of examples of his poor behavior."

She was on speaker because I had to keep working as we talked, and I glanced quickly to the right and left to make sure that no one else had caught her comment. I had the volume way down and the glass walls were thick, but yesterday, I'd been able to hear the man next to me (Harry) say that this was the shittiest job he'd ever had and that the boss had insulted us with the four-way brownie split. He didn't mention the improved selections we'd all enjoyed after that, which I thought showed that Beckett really was making an effort. He was weird and too demanding, but he was trying.

"I mean, he definitely has his quirks," I answered quietly. "We still have way, way too much work to do. I think at least three more people are quitting, despite all those extra lemon bars he gets for us to make up for sharing the cookie that he'd bought before."

"You all had to share a cookie? I guess I'd call that a quirk—hold on. Sophie just texted me," Addie interrupted herself, and there was a short silence. Then her volume rose a whole lot. "Oh, holy Mary! Patrick's girlfriend—no, she's not—the woman—the baby!"

"Addie," I said, just as loudly. "What's happening? What did Sophie say?"

Our older sister Sophie had reported that Patrick's baby was coming imminently, like it was being born right now in California. But from what she had written, it sounded like something was wrong.

"I'll call Mom," I said immediately.

"No, JuJu! Please don't do that! Sophie specifically says not to."

"Our mother has the right to know!" I said, aghast. "It's her grandchild being born and Patrick needs her!"

"Let Nicola handle telling her," Addie pleaded. "You know how she—"

But I wasn't listening, not this time. "You guys are totally unfair. I can't believe this!" I hung up, and called our mother.

"Juliet, the craziest thing," Mom answered, and she immediately launched into a story about what had happened at the repair shop when she'd gone to get a patch for a tire that had nearly exploded while she drove on the freeway, which would have caused a multi-car accident. And then, there had been a stray cat at the shop that probably had rabies. I agreed that it was so dangerous to drive with tires that weren't properly inflated and that yes, rabies was awful, but then I had to interrupt.

"Mom, have you talked to Patrick? Sophie says that his baby is coming, right now!"

"What?" she asked. Her shock was clear; the due date was still a few weeks off. "Why didn't he tell me?"

"I don't know. He told Nicola first and I think it's because she's a nurse and he needed medical advice. I've texted him, too, but he hasn't answered me."

"He'll answer me!" she said confidently. "I don't know why I wasn't the first person that he contacted, but he'll talk to me now."

I was sliding my thumb around my keyboard as I nodded, sending another message to my brother below the five that he hadn't yet responded to. "It's not fair that they tried to keep it from you," I agreed.

"Keep it from me?" she echoed. "Who was doing that?"

"I don't know," I said vaguely, "but you have to show them that you're going to handle this really well. You were right to convince Patrick to raise his baby, even if the mother wanted to give it away to strangers. He'll be a good father and you and I will be right there to help him. I know that Nicola thinks only she can raise kids, and yeah, she'll do an awesome job with her own baby—"

"What baby? JuJu, is Nicky pregnant?"

I sat for a moment, unsure about what to do. Yes, Nicola had asked me not to share that news, and I hadn't meant to…but they were wrong about Mom. She loved us all so much and they refused to acknowledge how lucky we were to have her, an attitude which I had never understood. There were people like Beckett in this world who didn't have parents at all, and my sisters complained about having a mother who wanted to be involved in our lives? A parent whose only offense was loving us too much, being too present?

"Yes, Nicola is pregnant. She just told me, too," I said, to mitigate my mother's hurt feelings. After Jude, Nic's husband, Mom should have been the first to find out and it sucked that I was the one telling her, not her first-born daughter at a special dinner or celebration. Nicola knew how much our mom had wanted grandkids.

"I can't believe it," she said, and I heard her start to cry. This was all a lot to take in.

"Why don't you try to talk to Patrick?" I suggested. "You're right, I'm sure he'll respond to you."

We hung up but I still couldn't do anything. I sat there at my desk trying to focus, but my thoughts were actually far away, in a place I'd never even been: San Francisco, California. That was where my twin brother had gone when he'd taken what he claimed was a great job, although my dad had looked into the company and hadn't been so cheerful about it. In not too long, Patrick had broken things off with his fiancée Liv, our former neighbor and my former teammate, a person who had also been one of my best friends. After that, he'd gone the rest of the way off the rails and behaved like a total jerk to the world at large. I didn't have a problem with wanting to mix things up with different people, but he'd actively and purposefully lied to women to get them to sleep with him. In fact, he'd been cheating on his fiancée with his boss, and then the boss found out that he'd been cheating on her, too. In a scene I'd witnessed frequently here in Detroit, he'd been escorted out to a California curb with his personal items in a cardboard box, which they'd reminded him to recycle.

Things for my brother went from bad to worse. I'd been working on calming him down and coaching him into a new job, but then he'd texted to let me know that he'd gotten a woman pregnant. Her plan had been to have the baby and then give it up for adoption. Yes, it was supposed to have been a secret, but I'd had to tell my mom because I'd known that he needed help with the situation. She had been thrilled, and set into motion her own plan to get Patrick to come home to Detroit where the two of them (with my help) would raise his child. He eventually agreed to go along with it, but none of my sisters thought it was a good idea and neither did our father.

They would see. Patrick would be a great dad, like I'd said. He would be, if the baby was ok—because this was too early, and Sophie seemed very, very worried in our group chat. I typed another message to him, begging him to respond and fill me in—and suddenly he answered that he had no idea what was happening with the kid because he had left the hospital and was in a bar. A bar?

"A bar?" I repeated out loud. What time was it in California? I glanced toward the offices on either side of me and did catch some interest from my coworkers, so I leisurely stood, stretched a little, and opened my door. My casual steps led me past Beckett's office, but he wasn't there, and I continued to the end of the hall. I looked quickly over my shoulder and then opened the last door, the one which led to the stairway in the middle of the building. It had real, cinderblock walls, which no one without x-ray vision could see through and which were thick enough that no one had heard me before when I'd come in here to deal with some of my financial issues.

"Patrick, pick up!" I hissed into his voicemail, and after three more attempts, he did.

"JuJu, I can't be at that hospital," he told me. "JuJu" was his nickname for me from when we were little, when "Juliet" had been too hard for him to say. His voice got high-pitched when he was nervous, as he currently was, and everything reminded me a lot of when we were kids. Except now, the situation was all too adult. He had to rise to the occasion and act like one.

"You have to get your butt to the hospital. Immediately!" I barked into the phone.

"You know how I can't cope with emergencies." I heard him sipping something—more like gulping.

"Put down your drink and get out of the bar. Your baby is being born! You need to be there!"

"She doesn't want me in the room. I don't even know her, JuJu. I don't know what the hell I'm doing. My life is a mess."

I felt my heart soften to him. It was true that losing his former fiancée, Liv, had pretty much wrecked him. And I did know how he got when he was anxious: he fell apart, and I'd had to pull him together more than once. I'd even tried to get Liv to go back with him, which hadn't worked. From afar, though, from almost twenty-five hundred miles to the east, what was I going to do?

I took another tack. "Even if you can't be in the delivery room, you should be there in the building and ready to help," I said more gently.

"Do you know anything about Thailand?" he asked suddenly. "It's hot, right? But someone could live there cheap."

"Thailand? What? You are not running away to Asia!" I lost all the gentleness. "Patrick, I swear, if I have to fly there and drag you out of that bar myself, I'll do it," I promised. "I will kick your butt in the middle of the biggest street in that whole city, and then I'll take you by the hair, and I'll frog-march you back to the hospital. I'm not exaggerating. In front of the whole city." He never had been able to deal with public shaming, which had made his high school career as a mascot perfect for him. While I'd stood almost naked on a raised platform, dripping wet, he'd hidden under a fur head. It also made sense because he was the best dancer out of all of us, but that mattered little at the moment.

"I've already heard that same crap from Nicola," he said, but at least he wasn't hanging up. "Addie and Sophie have been texting, too, and Mom. Did you tell her?"

"Didn't you want her to know?" I hedged.

"She wants me to be this reliable parent…I can't do it, Juliet. I can't be a role model for a kid! Nicola should take it. Everyone wants to be like her."

That was true, although it did rankle to hear it from my twin brother. "Mom is going to help you," I reminded him. "And I will, too."

"You? Last I heard, you owed thousands and thousands of dollars and you were about to get fired."

I swallowed. Those words had sounded loud in this stairwell. Had anyone been able to hear through the walls? I was very quiet as I listened for a response, like mocking laughter or derisive applause. The only things I heard were my pounding heart and the blood rushing through my brain.

"I'm paying that back," I said steadily. "I have a really good job and I'm not going to lose it." This job, the one that Mom had bragged about when I'd first been hired, had been why he'd turned to me over and over for money. Finally I'd had to say no. I couldn't give him any more, even if his landlord was threatening to put an eviction notice on his door. I just didn't have it, I'd said, and we'd argued a lot until I'd also had to explain why. I hadn't thought that there was room to sink any lower, but his horror and shock as he'd listened to what I'd done had made me feel thousands and thousands of times worse.

"I guess you won't be flying out here, not even to help me like you promised. Not since you're so poor that you can't afford your car payment." Now Patrick's voice sounded jeering, because he had the upper hand. Maybe he was the one who had run out of the hospital, but I was the one who'd overspent on my credit cards and gambled with card sharks. I was the one who'd had to accept Leni and Elissa moving into my apartment as payment for the debt I owed their boss. I was the one who'd had to get a second job on top of that. And my brother always got like this in our arguments. He fought like a kid who was going to stick out his tongue and turn around and show you his butt, rather than discussing things like an adult.

"No, I'm not coming out there. I wouldn't cross the street to help you!" I answered angrily, which was also not the most adult response either. I tried to calm down but it was too late; he hung up and he didn't answer when I called back at least ten more times. He didn't even read the texts I'd sent in which I alternately begged and threatened to get him back to his baby.

Messages had been flying around in our group chat during that entire conversation, mostly Sophie and Addie asking questions of Nicola, who also wasn't answering. I myself only wrote that I had talked to him and that I thought he was going to do the right thing. And then I sat there hoping it, and even though I hadn't been to church since my grandpa had died, I sat there praying it, too. I prayed for the little baby to be all right and I prayed for Patrick to be the good father that his child would need. I apologized for how I'd behaved, too, because now I was thinking a lot about what my brother had just said.

This baby needed a role model, someone to look up to. I loved my brother so much—but he had run away from her birth! And I loved my mom, too, but I knew that she sometimes flaked. It was all I ever heard about from my sisters. So with Mom a little unreliable, even though she didn't mean to be, I had promised that I would be around as a third rail of support.

But who was I? I was the woman who was an inch away from having to run and hide in another country for the rest of her life. I was the woman who had made a series of bad decisions that had seemed fine at the time, or at least fairly harmless.

I was barely making payments on a car that needed repairs that I couldn't pay for because I had spent so much on my credit cards that I could hardly deal with the interest. I was living with Leni and Elissa, who were under the control of a scary pimp. I was holding on with my fingertips to my job and I was likely to get fired at any moment myself.

My brother had said that he was a mess, but so was I.

"I know," I said out loud. "I know how stupid I was. I know. If you could please just help me fix it, I'll do better. I promise. Please?"

What was I expecting, the word of God to come to me in an office stairwell? I leaned against the wall under the handrail and closed my eyes—

"Juliet," a deep voice intoned.

My eyes flew open and I jerked upwards, hitting my head hard on the heavy brass railing. "Ow!" I yelped, and I actually saw stars.

"What are you doing out here?"

I looked up at my boss and suddenly understood how he had been able to circumvent Gigi and me on his first day at Whitaker Enterprises, when we'd tried to rush down to our desks but he had already been at his. It made sense how he was able to enter and exit without my notice. He was, apparently, not a vampire; he was the only person in this entire building who used the stairs.

"I only sat down for a minute. I'm not trying to get out of doing work," I started, but he interrupted.

"I had no idea that employees were using this area to hide. I'll have the door locked…no, that's a fire hazard," he told himself.

"You don't have to lock the stairwell door and force us to die of smoke inhalation," I responded. "I'm the only one who comes in here. And I haven't in a while, but I just heard that my brother's baby is being born—it may have already happened," I added, "and it's too early, and my sister says that there are problems. Something's wrong. They're out in California, which is really far, much too far for me to drive my car since I know that I need new tires and there's definitely something wrong with the brakes, and anyway, I can't miss work." I shook my head as I checked my phone again. Nothing!

"That's upsetting," he answered blandly.

"Yes, it is, and I didn't want to have a breakdown in front of my colleagues. I'll go," I announced, and rubbed my head as I stood. I was on the step above him and with seven inches of added height, I was now taller, but not by much.

"You seem very upset, although you aren't crying. I appreciate that," he said. "It's a huge pet peeve of mine when employees resort to tears."

"You're welcome?" I responded, although my dry eyes weren't for his benefit. "I'm not going to cry at work." I tried to step down past him, but he didn't move.

"You haven't heard if the baby is all right?"

"No," I said shortly, but then my phone softly dinged and I looked down. "Oh! There! It's—I don't know if it's a boy or a girl, but there it is!"

Beckett studied the baby. "Do they all look like that?" he asked doubtfully. "It's so red and wrinkled. It's like an overripe cherry tomato."

"That's very—oh! It's a girl! And she does not look like a cherry tomato," I defended my newest relative. She had tubes in her nose that were very worrying and made me feel slightly ill, and then Nicola sent over a long explanation of what they were. I started to read it but I was never very good with medical stuff, and that definitely made me feel sick. "My oldest sister, the nurse, says that the baby will have to stay at the hospital but she'll be ok," I summarized, and looked away from the message.

He took my phone and moved to the picture of the tiny girl. "I'm glad to hear that. If she's going to be so ruddy of complexion, it's certainly lucky that she didn't inherit the coppery shade of your hair," he noted next. "You're also very red in the face right now."

"I get some color when I'm upset."

"You turn bright red when you run," he noted further.

"Could you excuse me? I need to go back to my desk," I pointed out, but he pointed toward the baby on my phone. "What?"

"The time," he explained. "It's after seven and everyone is gone."

"Except for you. And I have more to do, so I need to stay," I explained. I'd been in this dumb stairwell for much too long, to the point that my butt was asleep and I felt very creaky. Also, I felt almost weak. Part of that was emotion, but also, having an actual meal at lunch made you even hungrier later. I should have stuck to the old dill pickle chips I'd found in the bottom drawer of my desk, because I didn't want to stop on the way home for groceries. I was well aware that the cupboards in my apartment were devoid of anything edible, except maybe some old raisins. It was also possible, due to the lack of upkeep in my building and my apartment specifically, that those weren't raisins. I wasn't going to be the one to find out.

"I'm not staying," Beckett said. "I'm actually going to dinner right now." But he was still standing directly in front of me, unmoving. "Do you want to come? It's not unusual for colleagues to have meals together, as we did at lunch."

"That was a great sandwich. Um…" I was thinking about the cost of it. If we were going as colleagues, I was going to have to pay my own way and he seemed the type to pick somewhere expensive and order bottles of wine that only my sister Brenna could pronounce properly.

"I was planning to go to the Mexican place down the street. The former department haunt," he clarified.

"I mean, we didn't haunt it…" I was still trying to run numbers in my head, but that particular restaurant wasn't too expensive—at least, I didn't think so. I'd never paid very much attention to the prices since Annis had put our Thursday drinks and apps on the company credit card. "Ok, yes," I said finally. "Thank you, I would like to get out of here. But I'm not going to drink." That would keep the cost down, as would my plan to gorge on the free chips and salsa and then order the smallest plate they offered, like a side order of tortillas or beans.

"Are you sure this is all right with you?" I asked him as we walked together in the emptying lobby. "I really have a lot of work."

"Stay late tomorrow," he suggested, which was exactly what all employees enjoyed on a Friday night, right? Weekend overtime was everyone's dream. "Is there any news from your brother?"

I had been avidly reading my phone. The baby was still ok, but everyone here in Michigan was fighting. "My mom is flying out tonight," I answered. Nicola had offered to go, Sophie had told her no, and I hadn't said anything. I was supposed to be the one heading off to help with this situation, but I was actually feeling lucky that I didn't have vacation days to take. I couldn't afford the plane ticket, of course, but I kept going over what my brother had said about being a father, how he couldn't be the person that this kid would look up to. Before, I would have said that I was. I was a successful athlete, on all the record boards at my high school and for my former swim club. I'd excelled in college, too—but now?

I rubbed my head as we silently walked down the block, as a cold wind whipped around our legs. No, I wasn't that person anymore. I was the person who was afraid to look at her phone because there were more voicemails about my credit card balances, and who was afraid to go home because I didn't know what strangers might have been partying in my living room. I was the person with the unaffordable car, with a beautiful purse that was empty of money, with a stack of credit cards that I didn't even want to see again.

And by the time that we'd made it to the restaurant and sat down, I had made a decision: "I will have a margarita," I announced, because I needed it. My hands were shaking with nervous anxiety. "Or, should I not? I drank with Annis, but…"

"This isn't a business function. And I'll pick up the tab," he told me, and immediately signaled to a server. He didn't seem like the type to dawdle over a meal (I'd watched him with the sandwich he'd had delivered for lunch, and his eyes had hardly moved at all from his monitor while he methodically consumed it). He was already checking his phone during this brief wait.

"I don't think this restaurant has a lot of healthy choices," I pointed out after we put in drink orders and were perusing the menus. I was actually starving, and a side order of tortillas just wouldn't have cut it.

"I'll find something." He immediately pointed to a picture and stood. "I need to take a call. If the waiter bothers to return, order this for me. No cheese, no sour cream, with the chicken grilled dry." He paused and then added, "Please," before he walked quickly toward the front door at the street.

Ok. I looked around at the crowd beyond our booth. Beckett had been particular about the table we'd been given by the host and I'd never sat this far back in the place, well away from the crowd that was getting louder with the effects of drinks and fun. I checked my own phone and read that Sophie had yelled at us all for our various transgressions and that Nicola seemed to have backed down about going to San Francisco and taking care of things herself. I knew that there would be problems for me tomorrow, when everyone calmed down about this and then discovered that I'd been the one to tell our mom about Patrick's baby and Nicola's, too, but I didn't care. My sisters always complained about the closeness between Mom and me, and I considered it to be jealousy. They could have had better relationships with her, too, if they hadn't done things like lie about pregnancies and births!

"Here you go, two margaritas," a voice behind me said, and a hand reached over my shoulder to set down a glass. Wait a minute—I immediately recognized that lollypop thumb, long and skinny with the big, round top.

My head whipped around. "Gigi?"

"Yeah, I got a job here for a while. You know that the manager always liked my tits," she noted, and took a seat on the other side of the table. He did like her, ever since she'd flashed him (both top and bottom, which our former boss Annis had found hilarious).

"I remember." I'd been pretty embarrassed by her choices, but I'd also been a few margaritas in by the time she'd started unclasping her bra. I might have been laughing along with the rest of the restaurant.

"This round is on me," Gigi said and pointed to my glass. "I saw your orange hair from where I was standing at the bar and knew it had to be you. Who else has that shit color and doesn't use a good toner?"

I ignored that, because my hair was not orange, and I assumed she meant the drinks were on the house instead of on her. It certainly wasn't in character for her to be generous, not with her own money. When our coworker Naomi (could have been Ann) had gotten married last year, Gigi hadn't given anything for the group gift, not even a few pennies. When one of the security guards had a stroke, she'd said, "So?" and refused to even sign the card, let alone contribute to the flowers we were sending.

And since I was aware of her lack of charitable feeling, her next words made my antennae go up. "I'm starting a new thing soon and I'm going to be rolling in money," she commented. "I was going to text and ask if you want to get in on this opportunity, too."

"Me?" I responded, totally flummoxed. "Why did you think of me?" We'd hardly gotten along when we worked together and we hadn't spoken at all since she'd been marched out. Also, the way she was phrasing it made "this opportunity" sound a lot like a scam.

"Aren't you interested in making money? I know you need it. I saw all the late and past-due notices in your desk," she explained, which meant that she'd gone through my drawers.

"Excuse me." Suddenly, Beckett loomed over the booth. He looked down at Gigi and nothing much changed about his expression, but a sense of disapproval exuded from beneath his perfectly cut suit. Most of the other patrons here had relaxed some, but he looked just as dapper as he had at the office, with his tie still tightly knotted and the top button of his shirt secure.

"Wow, dinner with the boss," she said, and winked at me. Then she reached down the scoop-neck of her shirt and pulled her boobs higher. "Nice, Juliet." She slid out of the booth and slowly brushed past him. "I'm not your waitress so I don't have to talk to you again tonight, but I'll be in touch," she told me, and then winked at me again and shrugged at Beckett. "Too bad you missed your chance," she commented to him as she walked away.

"She works here now?" he asked as he regained his seat. "I'm surprised. I would have thought she'd have gone for something else in the corporate world. Plenty of companies should have jumped immediately to hire her, based on her people-skills and office-appropriate wardrobe."

I looked at him for a moment before I shook my head. "Sometimes, I don't know if you're making a joke. Often," I corrected. "Don't you have any tells?"

"Tells? Are we playing poker?"

No, I would never play that again. "My brother looses color here when he's going to get in trouble." I gestured to the area around my mouth. "My sister Addie makes this face when she disapproves of something but doesn't want to tell you." I scrunched up my eyebrows, just as she always did.

"What about your other sisters?"

"Nicola, Sophie, and Brenna don't hide their disapproval or any other emotion, either. They'll tell you straight out even if you really don't want to hear it," I said. "Grace doesn't notice enough of what's going on around her to care about what other people are doing. She's oblivious to the world. I can't even count how many times I had to yank her back from walking right out into the street in front of a car, or I had to yank the wheel when she was learning to drive. Nic tried to teach her…sorry," I said. "I'm thinking a lot about my family but no one wants to hear my sibling stories."

"I don't mind."

It was hard to tell if that was true. I held up my glass instead. "Cheers. To my niece!" I said, and we both drank. My eyes immediately watered. "Wow! That's so strong!"

"Is it?" He took another sip of his. "I don't taste anything but an overabundance of simple syrup. A good margarita could have a little agave nectar, but this is close to undrinkable."

Holy Mary, he was such a snob. I took another cautious swallow. "It tastes so different," I remarked. I had no idea that I'd have such a reaction to sugar. "I guess they used more simple syrup than I'm used to," I agreed and kept sipping. It got less shocking as I drank. "Do you have any friends who live in town? From high school, maybe?"

"No."

"That's too bad," I mentioned.

"Not at all," he answered, also took another sip, and grimaced. He slid the glass away from himself.

"So, what should I know about you?" I asked. "You said you left to go to school in Boston, you worked in New York. And?" His eyebrow quirked up but I shook my head. "That doesn't intimidate me since I can do it, too," I informed him, and put up my own.

"Are you asking if I have hobbies? I wake up and work. I eat breakfast and work. I go to the gym, I eat dinner, I work, and then I sleep."

"Even on weekends?"

He seemed slightly puzzled by this question. "Yes, at least for a few hours. What do you do on weekends?"

"Well, I also work," I admitted. "I have a job waitressing in Royal Oak. It's kind of a pain to drive out there and parking is terrible, but the restaurant has a huge wine list and everyone drinks a ton. Tips are great."

He nodded slightly, and I wondered why I was telling him that. I'd never talked about it to my sisters, never admitted that I needed a second source of income to get by. "If you put in so many hours, it must be because you care a lot about your job," I noted. "Why do you like the law so much?"

"I don't, not particularly. I'm very good at it and I earn a sufficient salary to support my lifestyle. That's why I do what I do."

"If you work all the time, what kind of lifestyle do you have?" I asked skeptically, and he didn't answer that. I drank in silence and looked around, watching Gigi at a table full of men. One of them had his hand on the back of her thigh and she was laughing.

"I learned that you and the former head of our department had a close relationship," he remarked, totally out of the blue.

"Me and Annis? Not really. I wouldn't say that anyone in our department is particularly friendly."

"Not you and Gigi, either?"

We both watched her stick her finger in a guy's beer and draw on her cleavage. Even if the manager had previously liked her peep show, I bet that she would get fired soon. But the customer wasn't objecting, and his hand slid beneath her skirt. "No, we're definitely not close," I confirmed. "Where did you hear about that? Was it from the same person who told on us about Margarita Thursdays?"

Beckett nodded. "It was building security again. I've learned that they always know everything."

"Like what?"

"At my former firm, the security guards knew before anyone else that the managing partner was having an affair with a junior associate. They were both fired," he commented. "When I came to Whitaker Enterprises, I offered a large tip and received a lot of interesting information in return."

"And?" I pressed. "What else besides Margarita Thursdays?" He only shrugged a little and frowned at the bowl of chips.

"These are so coated in salt, they're close to inedible."

I ignored that ridiculous remark. Who wanted naked chips? "Were they the ones who figured out whatever Annis was doing that got her fired?" I pressed. The reasons behind her departure were still a matter of conjecture and a lot of interest among all of us who were left in our department, although we didn't have enough time for deep-dive gossip anymore.

"No, it wasn't the guards," he answered, and then hesitated. "Opposing counsel in a contract dispute over the Romulus development informed us that they had lodged a formal complaint over her conduct."

"About what? What did she do?" I asked, leaning forward eagerly.

"You mean besides using more printer ink than every other department in the company, combined?"

"I think she was running a business," I explained. "Another business on the side, and that was why she was always printing. But overuse of ink isn't why she got fired, right? Why would another lawyer care about that?"

In answer, he picked up his phone and opened the website of the State Bar of Michigan. "Type her name in here," he suggested, pointing to the fields where you could search for an attorney. I tapped in the letters and then touched the green enter button, but there were no results. I looked to him for an explanation.

"Annis doesn't appear in this directory because she's not a lawyer," he explained. "She went to school and graduated, but she never successfully passed the Bar exam and she's not licensed to practice in Michigan or in any other state." He paused. "You don't seem very surprised."

I finished the margarita. "I'm not," I admitted. "Honestly, she never seemed to know as much as she should have, but I just thought she was a terrible lawyer or that she didn't care about trying too hard." No one had cared much about what we were doing. "My dad is a CPA and he takes the ethical code for his job very seriously. I know there's a code for attorneys, too, but Annis didn't seem to be very ethical. Or serious."

"I believe that both of those things are true." He had resumed sipping his own drink. "When Steve called me and asked if I could step in, effective immediately, I couldn't believe what I was hearing. She was there for five years and no one had wondered why she was farming out so much work to other law firms, but it seems that the person who had preceded her in that position was also asinine. I have a team of attorneys auditing every single thing that she did, and I'm personally reviewing as much as I can, as well. On top of completing the real work that she had ignored or passed off to someone else, I also need to catch up on that."

My attention had snagged on something he'd said. "Steve?" I repeated. "Do you mean Stephen Whitaker, the CEO of the company? You guys are friends on a nickname basis?"

"We're relations. Cousins," he explained. "My mother was a Whitaker."

That made a lot of sense. I'd seen a few of those guys besides the CEO and they were, to a man, hot; Beckett fit in well with the family, looks-wise. "Lucky that your cousin could hire you," I commented.

"Lucky for him that an attorney with my dedication, education, and experience was available," he said, and clearly, he hadn't been pleased by my remark.

"Yeah, that was lucky," I agreed. "Very lucky." I believed it, too.

"You're right," he continued after a moment, and he sounded more conciliatory. "Steve was aware that I'd been looking for a new position. The fact that my predecessor had violated the Michigan Compiled Laws and pretended to be an attorney was coincidental, but it was also fortunate for me."

"It all worked out," I agreed. I'd already taken off my coat, and now I also pushed up the sleeves of my shirt because it had started to feel pretty hot in this restaurant. I waved my hand in front of my face, and signaled for another round. "No simple syrup, please," I requested, and the waiter said he'd tell the bartender. We finally ordered our food, too, and while I pointed to Dinner Special #3, Beckett had very exacting requirements for his which took a while.

"I don't want to sound dumb, but isn't a law license something that would be checked?" I asked when the waiter had headed to another table. "You're all good with your stuff, right?"

He sat up even straighter than usual. "I'm licensed to practice in New York, New Jersey, and Michigan. Is that satisfactory?"

"It is for me," I agreed. "When Annis got hired, didn't somebody look to see where she was licensed?"

"I suppose not." The corners of his mouth turned down. "There's currently some turmoil in the human resources department."

I assumed that meant people were getting fired. "That's tough for them. I'm sure they didn't mean to allow fraud and to endanger the company."

"That was exactly what they did," he agreed. "If you don't do your job, you deserve to lose it. That's not so shocking—at least, it shouldn't be. There are many surprising things about being an adult, but punishment for failure shouldn't be one of them." He held up his new glass and we clinked, and then I took a big gulp due to my thirst from all the delicious yet salty chips I'd consumed. Ugh, they had added too much simple syrup again. The drink burned its way down into my stomach and I had to eat more chips, which made me thirstier.

"What is?" I asked when I'd finished chewing.

"Excuse me?"

"What's surprising for you about being an adult? For me, it's the lack of structure," I continued, when he didn't immediately answer my question. "My whole life revolved around swimming, around the practices, meets, dryland workouts. I'd go from that to class, then to work, then studying, then to sleep. When I graduated, there was nothing. There were only long days and I didn't know how to fill them. I still don't." I swallowed more margarita. "This hurts my throat," I commented. "They really mixed them weirdly tonight. Well, what about you? What surprised you about growing up?"

Beckett swept his little finger over the tabletop, carefully building a pile of spilled salt and crumbs. "The loneliness," he said. "I thought that when people got older, they were in relationships. I thought that adults always had other people around them, but that's not true."

"Wow," I commented. "That's very sad. Can't you get a girlfriend?"

He stared. "Yes, Juliet, I'm perfectly capable of meeting women. Why does that drink hurt your throat?"

"I think there's too much simple syrup, like you said."

"Do you have an allergy to something?" he asked. "I didn't see it in your personnel file."

"Are you allowed to look at that?"

He picked up my glass and took a tiny sip from it. "Sweet Jesus. This is almost pure tequila. Did the other one taste the same?"

I nodded and rubbed my forehead. "I thought there was something weird, but you told me it was just syrup."

"Why would you have listened to that?"

"You seemed to know what you were talking about. You're very confident in your judgement," I explained, and shook my head back and forth, attempting to clear it. "I'm a little dizzy. I need to eat."

"Yes," he agreed, and signaled for the waiter again. This time, he asked for a pitcher of water and to put a rush on our dinners. "Shouldn't you trust your own judgement?"

"No, because it sucks," I answered, and realized vaguely that I shouldn't have told him that. It was true, though. "I'm in such a hole," I told the chip in my hand.

I looked up, then, and his blue-grey eyes were on me. "What kind of a hole?"

Wouldn't it have been easy to share my problems with him? Addie always said that you felt better when you got things off your chest. Right now, my body felt pleasantly fuzzy, and I'd had enough weighing on me that it had been hard to breathe for months. I could let that all go.

"I'm going to tell you," I announced, and it seemed like a good decision. It was actually a great decision, one that I was sure I wouldn't regret at all when the simple syrup wore off. I would only be happy and relieved when I told my boss that I owed money to everyone under the sun and when I explained all the terrible, embarrassing things I'd done to pay it back.

It was a great idea. I nodded and opened my mouth.