“More than I should. Don’t look so cocky.” She took a deep breath and looked at the stack of papers in her hands. “The gray suit over there is an executive of a local community bank and he has very deep pockets. He could probably pay to fix the Park Slope shelter with the change in those pockets, but I’m going to have to really turn on the charm to get even a fraction of that out of him.”
“Oh, that reminds me.” Josh reached into his pocket. “Courtesy of my firm.”
He handed Paige the check and watched as her eyes went wide with astonishment. “Holy cow. Are you kidding me with this?”
“No. Lauren told me about the shelter and the youth programming you want to do, and I pitched my boss this as part of my whole ‘giving back to the community’ thing. He got the firm to cut a check right away. Which honestly is probably pretty good for my karma. Some of my current clients are not nice people.”
“Sorry to hear that but not sorry your boss got the firm to part with this much money. This alone is almost two-thirds of our goal.”
“I’m happy to help. Really.”
“Take this to Monique. She’s the one with the clipboard by the door. She’s handling the actual money.”
“All right. I’ll do that. And I’ll call you about the date. I’ll find some dull restaurant in Manhattan. No candlelight or tablecloths or anything romantic. Mediocre food you’ll forget as soon as you’ve eaten it. How’s next Thursday?”
She laughed. “Sounds good. Tablecloths are romantic?”
He shrugged. “In certain contexts. Just roll with it.”
She nodded and walked away. He watched her for a moment, and then Lauren walked over. “You and Paige seem to have hit it off.”
Josh wondered if he should tell Lauren he’d asked out her best friend. It seemed like a bad idea without asking Paige if she was okay going public, something she seemed very reluctant to do. Josh guessed Paige didn’t want Lauren to know yet, so he kept his mouth shut. “Yeah. I got my firm to make a pretty generous donation, so I wanted to show her the check.” He still had said check in his hand, so he held it up to show Lauren.
“Wow. Your boss really wants to be absolved of some sins.”
“Yeah. This kind of law seems to involve a lot of helping terrible rich people keep their money. It’s…not exactly what I expected.”
“Well, like you keep saying, all you can do right now is ride it out while you figure out what you really want to do.”
“Too muchLaw & Ordermade me want to be a prosecutor, but that would be just as many hours for less than half the pay. Maybe that’s shallow, but—”
“Hey, do what you have to do. I’m not judging.”
“I do have a staggering amount of student debt to pay off.”
“Again, it’s cool. You want to sell your soul to a giant corporate law firm, that’s your business.”
“Right. Thanks for your support.”
Lauren grinned. “Did you have to trade in a favor to one of your mafia clients to get the night off?”
“Okay, we don’t represent any organized crime families.”
“That you know of.”
Josh sighed. He would not have been surprised to learn that Greg Provost was secretly a Gambino. But that was all just part of his late-night imaginings. Provost was probably innocent of any criminal activity, but he enjoyed his lavish lifestyle too much to feel morally compromised when he was hired by someone very likely guilty of some financial crime.
A cat hopped up on a table near where Josh stood and reached over to whack his arm.
“Hey!” said Josh. He looked at the cat, a striped orange cat with a white belly. Josh reached over to pet the cat’s head and the cat closed his eyes in ecstasy.
“You have a new friend,” said Lauren.
“Who is this guy? Does he have a fancy literary name?”
“That is Mr. Knightley.”
“Uh-huh. That means nothing to me.”
