I smile fondly. “Only in passing. She’d stop by every time they made major upgrades to the house. It’s been fifteen years at least since I saw her last, but I remember her being so elegant.”
“Yeah, she was.” His eyes drift away from mine, and he smiles to himself. There’s such tenderness in them that I want to wrap my armsaround him and absorb some of it.
I want him to smile like that when he thinks about me.
I shake that thought right out of my head. My eyes have always been too big for my stomach. And Kwame is much more than I can chew right now. I’m not biting. No matter how tempting he is.
Chapter Thirteen
Kwame
Restless
“This isn’t what I asked for. If you can’t do the work, stop wasting my time and tell me.”
The object of my anger, a first-year associate who thinks his law degree from Yale is a replacement for hard work, stands before me clutching the offending brief to his chest, his eyes stark with fear.
He has nothing to fear from me. The worst I can do is fire him. His father, like mine, is powerful and influential, and he’ll never have to go begging for work. But I’m not sorry to see something other than smug overconfidence on his face and I’m in a bad fucking mood. And his work product is actually shit.
“We charged our clients fifteen hundred dollars an hour for your work product and now we have to eat that because that advice,” I point to the file in his hands, “isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”
He flushes. “I’m sorry. I underestimated the research and I talked to Rummer and he said—”
“You could have asked God himself and this would still be wrong.” Tobias Rummer hasn’t written a motion in twenty years.
“I’m going to fix it.”
“You have until close of business today,” I warn him.
“I’ll get it done.”
“I hope so. Now, go away.”
“Okay.” He scurries out of my office.
He picked the wrong morning to fuck up. Coming to work at this place, in general, pisses me off. But a sleepless night of bone-deep regret and self-loathing has put me in a positively rancid mood.
I swivel my chair to face the large windows in my new corner office.
The hum of the city beneath me, a symphony of impatient car horns and the wail of police sirens and the sight of thousands of tourists flocking to the National Mall, used to invigorate me when I started this job.
Now, the only time I feel excitement in this office is when I’m leaving at the end of the day.
At almost forty, I’ve achieved what many would consider success. A decade as an assistant attorney general and now, counsel at one of the best criminal litigation practices in the country. I’ve got the respect of colleagues, and the clients I’ve taken on have confidence in me already. Keeping wealthy enough to pay my hourly rate from facing the consequences of their actions is not my idea of justice.
I took this job, moved back to the Washington DC area, and forgave my father for his sins in an attempt to honor my mother’s dying wish.Be the son he doesn’t deserve but needs.
It was a lot to ask but I wouldn’t deny my mother her last wish. And there remains a part of me that hopes my father and I can have the kind of relationship we ought to.
It only took two weeks for him to remind me why we’d never be close.
He only wanted me on the East Coast so I can be his social proxy.
All he talked about was me running for office so I could funnel money to his projects and investments.
He called it the American dream.
I called it a traitorous grift.
