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“It would be a nice change of pace, you have to admit.”
“I really always have believed she’s behind this.”
I say, “You’ve made that clear on more than one occasion.”
“Think about it. You’ve said it yourself, even before you knew about the prenup. She gets rid of me, she replaces me with my pal Gus. Gus basically gets my business. Like a merger and goddamn acquisition. They win. I lose.”
Then he says, “She called a little while ago, by the way. Claire.”
“To check in on you?”
“To tell me she’s leaving.”
“And going where?”
“The way she described it, it’s someplace where this trial can’t find her.”
He waggles a finger at me, and smiles.
“But I don’t need her.”
“Because you have me.”
“Bingo.”
I lean back in my chair now, put my head back, close my eyes. Wondering just how quickly I can get to Jimmy Cunniff’s bar.
“Everything today was about a prenup,” I say, really talking to myself.
“I couldn’t let Brigid say what she was about to say.”
I know he’s still going to be in that bed when I open my eyes back up.
Unfortunately he is.
“There’s a line I hear all the time in sports. When they say it’s not about the money, it’salwaysabout the money. I don’t care how much my wife hates me,” he says. “She’s not walking off into the sunset with mine.”
“Just curious again, Rob. What do you think is going to happen when the trial resumes and Brigid is back on the stand?”
Biggest smile yet. All those amazing white teeth. His closer smile.
“Then she really is going to lie for me,” Rob Jacobson says. “Like a champion.”
“And you know this…how?”
“I spoke to her a little while ago. She’s seeing the whole picture a lot better now.”
“Really. And what picture is that?”
“There’s an experimental treatment for her type of cancer at this cutting-edge clinic in Switzerland. There’s no way she and her husband can afford it. But I can.”
I stare at him, wondering all over again what my sister possibly could have seen in him, all the way back to college. What she still sees in him. And why she is protecting him, even now.
“You’re bribing her with hercancer?”
“That’s your interpretation. Mine is that I am offering much-needed, and potentially lifesaving, financial support to a dear friend.”
“By buying her silence.”
