KATRINA

Katrina

FOUR DAYS BEFORE

Chocolate truffles.

I'd gotten them as a gift from a grateful client—back when Vosges opened their first New York store, a client sent me a box of their truffles in an elegant purple box that was fancier than the one my engagement ring had come in. Cleo had been there when I opened the box, oohing and aahing. She was seven at the time and had a major sweet tooth; I'd nicknamed her "Snack Attack," which always made her giggle.

"Can I have them?" she'd asked. And the answer with Cleo was almost always yes—anything she wanted, anything I could give her. Often to make up for the things I worried I wasn't giving her—affection, warmth, hugs.

But I was headed out to a work dinner, already dressed and with my makeup on, and the evening babysitter had already arrived, because Aidan was away. It was late for chocolate, and some of the truffles might have had liquor in them. I didn't have time to check properly. I might not have been a champion cuddler, but I did always carefully read labels.

"Not tonight. Tomorrow, sweetheart," I'd said, kissing her head.

When I got home hours later, I went to check in on Cleo. As I stood there in her darkened bedroom, I panicked; my first thought was that the streaks across her face and sheets were blood. But when I flipped on the lights, I quickly realized my mistake: She'd taken the truffles to bed and fallen asleep while eating them. The whole box.

And I'll never forget how I felt: paralyzed.

Cleo was supposed to defy me: She was a child. And yet in that moment, I knew I'd never survive the gray zone of adolescence—the years during which she'd push back against me by doing deliberately bad, dangerous things. In the end, of course, I'd been right. I had not survived. Cleo and I had not.

I stopped walking a few blocks from the Box, dropped down on the stoop of a stately brownstone next to the Waverly Inn.

There was no getting around it now—Cleo and Kyle were mixed up together again, the handoff at the gym probably to avoid her being seen at Kyle's apartment. Despite the fact that I'd personally made it crystal clear to Kyle that he was never to see Cleo again.

I hadn't gone alone when I went to deliver my warning. He would have easily dismissed me as Cleo's annoying but harmless mom. Seargant Mitch McKinney had agreed to stand behind me looking imposing, but not in uniform, of course, when I knocked on Kyle's door. Stand there, but that was it. And only because Cleo might be in danger. Because Sergeant McKinney didn't have probable cause to be threatening Kyle in an official capacity. He didn't even want to know the details, nor was he happy to be there. But I'd written McKinney the recommendation that he credited with getting him into Fordham Law School. His affection for me ran deep. But it was thanks to the hundred-dollar bill I had on me that we sailed past Kyle's doorman in his absurdly fancy building without calling up first.

"Where the fuck have you been, Tebow?" Kyle shouted as he swung open his apartment door. He made a face when he saw us. "Who the hell are—"

"Stay away from Cleo McHugh," I said.

Kyle's expression flipped from confused to dismissive. Then his eyes flicked in McKinney's direction, totally unfazed. "Fuck off."

I stepped closer. "Go anywhere near Cleo again," I said, "and you'll end up in jail."

Kyle squinted, inspecting my face.

"Holy shit, are you her mom?" And then he laughed as he dug in his shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He stuck one in his mouth, lit it, and inhaled.

"Yes, I'm her mom."

"And you actually think Cleo cares what you want?" He exhaled right in my face. "Cleo hates you. She thinks you're a fucking bi—"

In one swift movement, Sergeant McKinney had Kyle by the throat, jacked up against the wall. "Listen, you little shit," I said. "Stay away from her, or we'll come back and see to it you do."

At the time, the threat had appeared to work—Kyle had vanished. I'd followed Cleo some and had never seen her go near his apartment again. But it took me a while to shake the look in Kyle's eyes as we were leaving. Like he wanted me dead. Like he'd happily do it himself. I wondered now if I'd underestimated the danger he posed. Maybe he'd been playing some kind of long game and had roped Cleo in again—but this time for revenge.

I was going to have to figure out a way to warn her. I had to try at least. I pulled out my phone.

How's it going? I texted her.

Three little dots appeared. I blinked, but they were still there. Cleo hadn't responded in so long and this time right away?

OK.

Could we meet for coffee? I typed.

Why?

I'd love to see you. You know, casual. Like we hadn't been estranged for months.

There was a long delay. Perhaps that love had been too much.

Maybe next week.

Can we do it sooner? There's something I need to tell you.

Tell me now.

In person. I need to tell you in person. This was true. It was too much to explain in a text. It would sound too bad.

Srsly?

I could come to your dorm?

No.

Come to BKLYN?

NO.

Please, Cleo, I really need to talk. I get why you might not want to come home. And that's okay. But can you please come anyway? I won't be annoying, I promise.

Definitely a lie. Cleo being merely annoyed was the best-case scenario.

I don't believe u.

How about cold, hard cash, then? I'm assuming you take Venmo.

A joke and not a joke.

Lemme look at my schedule and get back 2 u.

Okay! Great! Love you!

I was hoping that she'd write something warm in return. I knew better of course. And it didn't matter. My job was to love Cleo no matter what. Cleo didn't have any job except to be herself.

My phone buzzed in my hand again.

If you want me to go away, you're going to have to pay. In more ways than one.

I stared down at the new message from my anonymous friend, debating. Situations like this required a delicate calibration. It generally wasn't a great idea to completely ignore a person once he'd made a concrete demand for money. That demand was bribery, which meant that person had already committed one actual crime. Ignoring them often led to further escalation.

Who is this?

Someone who knows what you did, bitch.

Silas used to call all women and girls bitches, didn't he? It was hard to remember. He said and did a lot of things. But, of course, I'd thought of him first. He'd been working that night. He was one of Daitch's right-hand men. It was Silas sending the messages. It had to be. I squared my shoulders before typing my reply.

I don't know what you're talking about.

What would your law firm think? Or the police? You stabbed someone that night and Haven House helped you cover it up. I know all about it.

It was much later than I'd planned when I got to the office. Mark had even checked in again to confirm I was on my way. He was understanding when I'd cited "family issues," but he was still wound up. I'd tried to reach Jules to see if she had any sense of what might be going on. But my call had rolled straight to her voice mail. Not a surprise, given that it was bedtime for her daughter. But as I was listening to her outgoing message, I remembered our strange call from two nights ago. She'd never called me back. Come to think of it, she hadn't been in touch all day.

I'd spent much of the trip uptown wondering if I should reach out to Haven House, see if I could track Silas down. I did know how to make threats of my own. And in my experience, threats were most effective when their location and timing took people by surprise. But I didn't want to risk intentionally putting myself on Haven House's radar after all these years. I wasn't easy to find. I'd been careful to scour the internet over the years for any references to my maiden name—Columbia Law School was a particularly bad serial offender. But it was surprisingly easy to get things taken down when you were sufficiently tenacious.

From the doorway of Mark's office, I could see him at his desk, reading something on his massive monitor—the one he said helped him pretend he didn't need more powerful reading glasses. At least it went with his massive corner office, the biggest one on the floor. When I knocked, he turned to eye me over the top of his wire-framed glasses. His face softened immediately.

"Oh, Kat, so glad you're here," he said.

"Did you see Jules today?" I turned my head toward the assistants' cluster of desks, which sat between Mark's office and mine, though they were all empty at that hour.

"I think she may have been out," Mark said. "Is something wrong?"

"I'm sure it's fine," I said quickly.

"Well, unfortunately, we've got something of a priority situation on our hands."

Mark stood, which made him look tiny behind his large desk. Notably distinguished but also very short, Mark had been quite the catch in his prime, I suspected. At sixty-five, he was still very charismatic and youthful, jamming upstate with his college bandmates and running daily in the park. His beautiful, kind wife was a poetry professor at Princeton and was struggling with stage IV breast cancer. Now that their three children were grown, the two of them lived alone in a gorgeous Upper West Side brownstone filled with incredible art and beautiful antiques. And love—so much love. It was the kind of life I'd imagined Aidan and I might one day have, back when I still believed what we had was happiness.

Mark motioned toward his pair of Barcelona chairs.

"I'm sorry I've been hard to reach," I said as I sank into the soft leather seat. "I've been dealing with a bit of a situation with Cleo."

Mark nodded. He knew Aidan and I were separated and he knew about the tension between Cleo and me, though I hadn't shared how bad things had gotten lately. He was also gener ally incredibly respectful of family matters. One mention of a sick child or ailing parent or school play that needed attending and Mark was the first to insist that take priority. But tonight the mention of Cleo hadn't elicited even a flicker of recognition. Whatever was going on must be serious.

"This new matter is a little different than what you typically work on." He fell quiet, like he was waiting for permission to continue.

"Maybe you can tell me a little more?"

"Right, of course," he said. "A client has a high-profile employee who the employer suspects was involved in some illegal activity. Illegal activity that may have impacted his performance at work, which has potentially exposed the employer to liability."

"That sounds exactly like every situation I handle."

Mark smiled. "Fair point," he said. "Except the employee, in this case, is recently deceased. A death that his employer suspects may be tied to the personal issues he was having. Drove his car into a telephone pole. Seems this employee may have been distracted enough beforehand that he made errors while at work. Errors that may now be linked to product defects, which injured consumers."

I cleared my throat. Willed myself not to overreact. This was a coincidence, obviously.

But my hands were trembling as I retrieved a pad and a pen from my work bag to take notes. "Who is the employer?"

"Darden Pharmaceuticals."

I kept my eyes on the pad.

"And who is the employee?" I asked, hoping the tremor in my voice wasn't as obvious as it felt.

"Doug Sinclair, VP of Risk Management." Mark sighed, adjusting his glasses. "Darden doesn't know what his personal issues were. And they need to in order to respond to this situation wholeheartedly. That's where you come in."

I should tell Mark about Doug and me, immediately. It would be the ethically responsible thing to do. But then again, what difference could it possibly make now?

"I'm sorry, what is it that Darden wants from us, exactly, with respect to these personal stressors?" I asked, pressing on.

"Tragedy notwithstanding, Darden would simply like the truth on the record. This employee was entrusted with ensuring the safety of a drug that seems to have had … issues. Apparently, he was contacted by a doctor—one of a group of OB-GYNs who'd gotten acquainted at a conference. That doctor had noticed a possible connection between cases involving Xytek and bad outcomes in pregnant patients. But Doug Sinclair never made the required adverse event report to the FDA. If he had, given the severity of the allegation, the drug would have been pulled immediately while an investigation was conducted, or at least an appropriate warning issued. If Doug's personal problems were serious enough that he committed suicide …" Mark shook his head ruefully. "Perhaps those same issues could have caused him to mishandle reporting the call."

"What about the people actually involved in the drug's manufacture or the approval process? Aren't they the ones who are really at fault?"

"Doug wasn't a chemist, of course. In fact, he joined Darden after the drug was already on the market. But the reality is, complications often surface later with prescription drugs, often in an unforeseen subset of patients. As soon as a company becomes aware, though, it must be reported to the FDA. From there the drug either gets pulled or it gets a black box warning like Xytek now has. That's the best a company can do—respond to known risks. But Doug Sinclair was the only one who knew about these physicians' warnings, because he got the call. And these weren't small problems. There have been infant fatalities ." Mark caught himself. "Allegedly. That's according to the accusations in the lawsuit. Now that the MDL has been consolidated, we're going to take over the defense, a big upgrade from that small slice of Darden's M and A business we only recently took over. If this litigation goes well, we could be in line to take over as the company's lead outside counsel on all matters. Fiscally speaking, that would be very helpful. As you know, it's been a challenging couple of years for the firm."

Blair, Stevenson had lost two big clients when they'd been bankrupted by the recession. And then J.P. Morgan had taken a huge swath of their business elsewhere because of a petty conflict between their general counsel and our head of M his wife is deceased. He was apparently quite depressed in the weeks leading up to the accident. It appears that this threat of blackmail was the straw that broke the camel's back. Darden needs these facts confirmed, that's all."

This was absurd. Even if Doug had, in fact, availed himself of Advantage Consulting's "extra" services. Even if he had lied to me and had bribed Amherst, making the blackmail a bigger threat than he'd let on—Doug was not depressed.

"So, no one at Darden had any idea about the issues with this drug before this physician called Doug. That's Darden's position?" It came out a bit more sharply than I'd intended.

"That doesn't seem plausible to you?"

"Not especially, given what's got to be a very complex process of checks and double checks. From the little I know, this MDL is massive. Thousands of claimants. Seems unlikely that there were no earlier red flags. And not in any testing, either?"

"I personally don't know enough about the drug develop ment process to assess that likelihood." Mark shrugged. Then he looked me in the eye. "And frankly, neither do you."

Ah, now Mark was being sharp. He was right. I wasn't that familiar with the details of Doug's job or the prescription drug manufacturing process, but my gut said this whole thing didn't hold water.

"Regardless, I don't think Darden needs to worry," I said. "I mean, even if these details about Doug's personal life did surface, the public would be unlikely to make the connection between any of that and Xytek. Why not just leave it alone?"

Tell him you knew Doug. It wasn't too late.

"Oh, no, no. I'm sorry. I'm not being clear," Mark went on. "Darden isn't worried about these facts surfacing . They want Doug Sinclair's personal situation, the truth of it, made public. They want to demonstrate that they would have acted immediately if they had known physicians were detecting a problem."

In other words, Darden wanted Doug—now dead and unable to defend himself—to be the sacrificial lamb. That said, did I know him well enough after three weeks to say for sure he wasn't responsible in some way, for something? No.

But I also knew a smoke screen when I saw one.

"Understood," I said. Mark kept looking at me like it was my turn to talk.

"Is everything okay, Kat?" he asked. He could tell something was up.

"Oh, yes … Cleo, you know, the usual. But don't worry. I'm on this."

And I would be, until I could figure out a graceful way not to be.

Mark nodded. "Thank you, Kat. I really appreciate having you at the wheel here," he said. "Obviously, keeping Darden happy is critical. The billables from this lawsuit alone will help keep the lights on, and getting Darden's entire book of business would secure the firm's future for years. But for any of that to happen, we are going to need to sort this Sinclair situation first—Darden's general counsel has made that abundantly clear. On a personal level, Phil Beaumont is also an old friend, and frankly, I've never seen him so upset. He feels genuinely awful about what's happened to the families impacted by this drug; all of Darden's top-level management does. They want to make this right."

"Understood." I nodded, tucked away my notebook, and stood to leave.

"Wait, Kat," Mark said quietly as I headed for the door. "About Cleo. She'll be okay?"

"Presumably, yes. You know Cleo—she's always liked to push the envelope." I wanted so badly in that moment to confide in Mark about Kyle. I wanted to tell him about the anonymous messages I was getting, too. I wanted to tell him everything. But that would also mean telling him what I'd done all those years ago. And even with all the secrets between us, that crossed a whole different kind of line. "In the meantime, hopefully she won't worry me to death."

Mark smiled.

"Cleo is very lucky to have you looking out for her, that's for sure. Eventually, she'll realize that. They always do."