The law offices of Harrison & Cole occupied the thirty-first floor of a glass tower in the financial district, and by the time Emily arrived the rain was coming down in earnest, drumming on the roof of the cab, racing in rivulets along the curbs. She paid the driver, stepped out, and stood for a moment on the sidewalk with the rain falling around her, looking up at the building. Then she went inside.
The conference room they had been assigned was long and formal, with a mahogany table that could seat twenty people and a set of windows that looked out over the rain-soaked city. The leather chairs smelled new and faintly chemical. There was a carafe of coffee on a side table that no one had touched. Emily sat down on her side of the table, placed her bag on the floor beside her feet, and rested her hands in her lap, and she waited.
She did not wait long.
Ethan arrived eight minutes later, and he arrived the way he always arrived everywhere—as though the room had been designed specifically to receive him. He wore a charcoal suit that had been tailored to fit his shoulders with mathematical precision, a silk tie in a deep burgundy that picked up the color of his cufflinks, and shoes that caught the light from the overhead fixtures and threw it back in small bright sparks. His hair was perfect. It was always perfect. He had the kind of face that photographed well from every angle, the kind of jaw that suggested authority without effort, and he moved through the world in a way that suggested he had never once, not even in childhood, doubted that it was arranged for his benefit.
Behind him came Vanessa.
She was tall, carefully assembled, wearing a coat that Emily recognized from a boutique on the upper east side where the prices started at four figures. She carried a small designer bag in the crook of one arm and her phone in her other hand, and she was already looking at the screen when she entered the room, which was how Ethan’s girlfriend acknowledged spaces she considered beneath her attention—by not looking at them at all.
Ethan’s lawyer followed, a thin man in a gray suit who carried an expensive briefcase and wore the expression of someone who had facilitated enough of these meetings to feel nothing in particular about this one.