Honor shook her head. “Thanks, but no. I’m going to finish these files and head home.”
Rather than take the hint that she wasn’t interested in company, Keith came all the way into her office and set his briefcase on the credenza beside her door. Honor watched him come close, pick up a banker’s box from one of the chairs before her desk, set it aside, and sit down.
On the wall to her left and his right, the television was on, playing the local news, the volume just barely high enough to hear. As Keith made himself comfortable, Honor’s image on the courthouse steps came onto the screen, playing behind the talking head of the news anchor. The chyron running across the bottom of the screen read NOT GUILTY: Judith Jones acquitted of all charges.
“Hey—turn it up.”
“No. I know what I said, and I know you saw this story on the earlier broadcast.”
Picking up on her cold tone, Keith huffed. “Honor, come on. You’re reacting too emotionally about all this. You couldn’t possibly have thought the old man would go for it. Take a breath, calm down, and see this rationally. The threat you made today hurts you more than anyone.”
She closed her laptop and rested her hands on it, her fingers laced. “I am perfectly calm, Keith, and I didn’t make a threat. I gave an ultimatum.”
“And that was hotheaded and stupid.”
“It was emphatic, but that’s not synonymous with hotheaded. I was calm then, and I’m calm now. I know my worth. If Silas doesn’t, then it’s time for me to move on.” Silas Bellamy, founding partner of Bellamy, White, and Cohn, Attorneys at Law. A good old boy, who wore pointy-toed cowboy boots and a Stetson to work, as if he rode in on a stallion instead of the back seat of a Bentley.
“To what? You think you’ll be able to accomplish on your own what you’ve accomplished here? Nobody else has the resources of Bellamy White. Nobody else will let you turn those resources on a pro bono case like this one. This firm is why you’re so successful.”
“No, Keith. My skill is why I’m so successful. If it was all down to this firm, then you’d have a win record like mine.”
He blinked as her barb struck its target. “Don’t be a bitch, Honor.”
“Let’s review the past five minutes, Keith. Since you came into my office uninvited, you’ve called me emotional, told me to calm down, to be rational. You’ve called me hotheaded and stupid. And now you’ve called me a bitch. Do you see a trend here, counselor?”
“I suppose now you’re going to say I’m sexist.”
“Yes, I am. This whole firm is a sexist cesspool. I guarantee that if I’d walked into that meeting this afternoon as Howard Babinot and said the exact same words, used the exact same tone, the conversation we’d have had then, and the one you and I are having now, would have been entirely different.”
“You can’t know that.”
Of course she could. Every woman in the workforce knew it. “I know that you and I came into this firm together. You don’t have my win ratio, or my reputation, and you don’t log anything like my billable hours. And yet you made partner.”
“That’s harsh.”
“The truth is often uncomfortable.”
Keith was actually a friend. They’d been good support for each other in those first years as associates, and she didn’t resent him—much—for his personal ambition. It wasn’t his fault—much—that he’d capitalized on this old firm’s old ways.
So Honor backed off. “Look, I’m not saying you don’t deserve to be partner. But I know my value, and I deserve much more than this firm has recognized. Silas actually told me, in so many words, that when I have babies I won’t care so much about my job. I could sue this place’s doors off just for that exchange alone. It’s time I stopped waiting for him and Joe to have an epiphany and join the twenty-first century. I want to be partner.”
“Honor, you told them you want your name on the wall. You want to jump over everybody and be a full partner.”
“I do. If they’d offered me junior a couple of years ago, I’d have taken it. But they didn’t, and now I want them to make up for that oversight. I deserve to be a full partner. I can afford the buy-in. I bring in the billables to support it. And I bring more publicity to this firm than any of the partners combined.”
“You also draw a bigger salary than some of the junior partners, including me. And you charge more pro bono hours to the firm than any attorneys here combined. This is a white-shoe firm, Honor. You’re not going to find what you have here at any other firm.”
Honor said aloud for the first time the thing she’d decided sitting in her office in the quiet. “I’m not going to another firm, Keith. I’m opening my own.”
He sagged back into the chair, his mouth slack with shock. Honor was quiet, letting him—and herself—process the terrifying truth she’d just uttered.
“I can’t decide if that’s bold as hell or the most moronic thing I’ve ever heard.”
Me either, she thought. But she kept those words to herself.
*****
That night, Honor walked into her loft apartment and dropped her briefcase and handbag on the floor under the narrow entry table. Her keys clattered into the ceramic bowl, and she kicked off her Manolo Blahnik pumps, letting them land in a haphazard jumble beside her bags.
Turning back to the door, she engaged the locks and reset the alarm. She lived in Midtown Boise, not Manhattan, but as a criminal defense attorney, she worked around dangerous people every day, and she’d had her share of threats of death and violence. Once, a threat had materialized into an attack, and one of her neighbors had been hurt. So she lived in a building with a secure elevator, and she had plenty of security in her apartment, too.
Her undergraduate and law degrees were from Columbia, so she’d lived in Manhattan for several years and had even shared a loft with five other students. Boise’s idea of loft living was entirely different. In New York, they’d had a drafty, damp, barely converted warehouse, and the only privacy any of the roommates had had were the screens and beaded curtains they’d arranged around their beds. Even the bathroom had only been private because they’d scavenged old cubicle walls from the alley behind an office building.
Those years had been the best of her life.
Her ‘loft’ in Midtown Boise was a very expensive, very airy apartment on a high floor of a condominium building with a dramatic name. All the walls that faced the Boise skyline were glass, but the space wasn’t drafty or damp. The main living area was all one space, but her bedroom and office were their own rooms, and her bathroom was as big as her office.
Without turning the main lights on, letting the low-wattage can lights that were on a timer and came on at dusk serve to guide her, Honor walked deeper into her home. After a detour to the kitchen area to pour herself a full glass of the chardonnay she’d been working on the past couple nights, she crossed to the windows and looked out over the city spread wide and low before her, the lights of its mellow night life twinkling.
She could afford this beautiful space, and its beautiful furnishings, and her beautiful clothes, and her Porsche Cayenne, because she was paid well. She was a success, even without being partner. What she’d told the partners today, staring Silas Bellamy in his sharp, hooded blue eyes, put all this at risk.
But she was the top earner in the entire firm. Yes, she took more pro bono cases than anyone else, but when she took a paying client—like Heath Cahill, last fall—they paid top dollar. And they got representation worth it. She also had the best win record of any attorney in the defense division.
The Cahill case was one of her crowning achievements in criminal defense. A wealthy rancher on trial for first-degree murder of a man he’d manifestly wanted dead and had beaten bloody virtually every time he’d laid eyes on him. Though Cahill was innocent of the charge—not because he wouldn’t have killed the victim but because he hadn’t at that time—it had been an unwinnable case, with a mountain of circumstantial evidence and no small amount of material evidence
as well, pointing directly to Cahill as the killer.
But Cahill was a free man, with all charges withdrawn before the case had gone to the jury. Her reputation had been excellent before the Cahill case, but Honor had become a legend in the legal circuit on that day. National news had taken notice. Local news had done a thirty-minute special. And Bellamy White had shone in the light of all that attention turned her way.
The only reason she wasn’t partner was her gender. All of the partners at Bellamy White were white men. This far into the twenty-first century, her decades-old law firm still clung to a Mad Men model of business. Not even as enlightened as that—hell, even Mad Men made Joan a partner. Of course, she’d had to earn it on her back.
Men sucked. All of them. Thoroughly.
As she’d reminded Keith, she could sue, but suing lawyers was a long, costly, ugly business, and in the meantime, she’d be busily starving. Besides, Boise might be the most open-minded place in Idaho, but that was a very low bar. It was hardly a bastion of liberal thought and progressive action, so she might not win. If she lost, even if she’d managed not to become homeless and starving during the fight, her career would be in permanent tatters.
No, the ultimatum was the right course. If they called her on it, she’d do what she told Keith: she’d open her own office. In the morning, she’d begin the process of preparing her client list, figuring out which she could bring with her and which the firm had a strong claim on. She needed to find a space. And a staff—she needed to understand if she could afford a staff.
Keith was right about one thing: she could never afford the specialists she had access to at Bellamy White. On some cases—the Cahill case, for example—she had a team of four or six people working full time, even overtime, finding clues and interpreting them, helping her build the defense’s story. Investigators, scientists, intelligence specialists, forensic specialists, paralegals, most of whom earned close to or well within six-figure salaries. On her own, she’d be lucky to be able to afford someone to answer the phones.
Oh shit, what was she doing? This was not a call she could make on a fucking whim. Oh shit, oh shit.
But it wasn’t a whim. Was it? Was it a whim?
Swallowing the rest of her wine down in a gulp, Honor practically ran back to the entry and grabbed her phone from her bag. It was past eleven o’clock—and an hour later at her parents’ house in Madison, Wisconsin—but her father was a night owl, like she was, and he’d be up. He was the Dean of the College of Letters & Science at the University of Wisconsin. A lifelong academic, he’d learned long ago that the late hours of the evening and early of the morning were his best time to do his own work and find his own leisure.
The same was true for Honor. Her work took up all the hours of normal life.
It rang once. “Good evening, minette.”
The sound of his voice calmed her at once. “Hi, Daddy. What are you up to tonight?” She went back to the living room and curled up on the sofa, tucking her feet under her, facing the twinkling night view.
“Tying flies, waiting for your mother to get home.”
“She’s still out?”
“She is. She had a planning meeting, and those always go on forever.”
Her mother had been a social justice warrior long before anyone had come up with that term or used it, idiotically, like a weapon. “What’s she saving tonight?”
“Refugees. Are you all right, Honor? You sound stressed.”
“I did something today. I might have made a huge mistake. Can I talk it out with you?”
In the background, she heard the rustle and rattle of his tools being set down and his glasses joining them. His old wooden swivel desk chair creaked as he leaned back and got comfortable. “Of course. Start at the beginning, and we’ll work it through.”
Calm assuredness filled Honor’s chest as she took in and let out a breath. When she got off this call, she’d know what to do. Her father wouldn’t tell her; he’d walk at her side until she found the answer for herself.
Chapter Two
Silas Bellamy was a legend in Boise, but he hadn’t tried a case in at least a decade, possibly two. He was well into his eighties and often said, in a voice that still boomed, that he ‘left the fight to the young guns’ these days, but he came into the office every day and spent his time glad-handing and back-slapping.
He was a cowboy cliché, and his office extended the image, with Remington paintings on the walls and Remington sculptures on the surfaces. A spotted cowhide rug stretched under his huge, heavy desk and the leather chairs facing it. Some kind of horns, probably bull, rested on a stand at the edge of the desk, between Silas and his visitors.
At the moment, Honor was his visitor. She sat stiffly, refusing to allow herself to fidget, in a leather chair and watched as the founding partner of Bellamy, White, and Cohn read the letter she’d presented him with.
He finished and took his glasses off. When he looked up at her, he wore a grin she knew well and despised. His ‘little lady’ smirk. “Well, I guess you mean business, then. I’ll talk to Herb. I’m sure we can find you a little extra for your purse. Say, twenty thousand per annum?”
“Silas, I told you my terms. Full partner. Name on the wall.” Her fingers wanted to clench, but she had years of practice in not showing stress, so she remained still. Not relaxed, but not visibly tense, either.
His smirk spread to a wide, sharkish grin, showing his perfect white implants. “That’s not gonna happen and you know it, darlin’. There are only three named partners and six junior partners in this firm. None of them are so arrogant to think they deserve their name up with mine and Joe’s.”
Herb Cohn was a full partner, too, and had had his name on the wall as long as Honor had been with the firm, but Silas hardly ever mentioned him in the same breath as himself and Joe White, and no one in Boise referred to the firm’s full name.
It had not escaped Honor’s notice that even now, Silas wasn’t offering her any kind of partnership, not even junior partner. He did not want a woman at his table. She could probably negotiate hard enough to win a junior seat, but every syllable out of Silas’s mouth made her conviction stronger: she needed to leave this firm. She needed to turn her back on her cushy office and the fantastic support staff, and the vaunted reputation of Bellamy White.
And that was absolutely terrifying.
Keith had been right on one count. At least some of her success had been due not to her superior litigation skills but to the resources she had access to at Bellamy White. Their investigation and forensics division, with its own lab. An entire floor of paralegals and archivists. A huge fund earmarked to support pro bono work.
She had never failed in her life, and the thought that she now might turned the contents of her stomach to sour fire. Going out on her own would mean struggling in ways she never had. But talking with her father last night, she’d understood that one key fact: she would never succeed to her full potential at Bellamy White. She was leaning on good old boys for her success, and they would hold her back. They already were holding her back.
Yes, she would struggle, and probably fail a bit, until she got her feet under her, but when she could stand on her own, there wouldn’t be anyone in her way when she started to climb again.
Her father had also reminded her that if she failed too badly, her parents were there to cushion the fall. She wouldn’t starve or be homeless. She might have to slink back to the nest, but she could start over. She was licensed to practice in Wisconsin and New York as well as Idaho. Landing in Boise hadn’t even been part of her plan back in law school.
Before Silas himself had come to Columbia to recruit new associates, all Honor had ever known about Idaho was a vague sense that potatoes came from it. She’d only accepted the invitation to interview because she was trying to get as much interviewing experience as possible.
Then Silas had wooed her aggressively, making her an offer she couldn’t refuse, almost half again as much salary as the New
York firm she’d interned at had offered her. And now she was here, seven years later, almost eight, with a life she’d built from scratch—and loved.
She was about to risk it all, but it was time to leave the cushy constraints of this place and see what she was capable of.
“I do know it, Silas. That’s why you just read my resignation letter. I’ll finish out the month, but then I will be leaving Bellamy, White and Cohn.”
The old man’s grin disappeared at once, and he let his anger show. “No, you won’t. I’m sending Daryl to your office. Take the morning to turn your cases over to him for reassignment. Take the afternoon to pack your personals. Security will collect you and escort you out at three o’clock this afternoon. And I hope you’re not naïve enough to think you’ll get a letter of reference from me or any partner here, missy.”
When she’d first started at this firm, she’d thought Silas charming and grandfatherly. His sexist comments and old-fashioned chivalry had irritated her, but she’d considered them mostly harmless, and she’d been too busy scrambling to build her reputation to really notice him. It wasn’t until Keith and she had gone up for partner together that she’d started to really look around and see that the ceiling wasn’t even glass here at Bellamy White. It was concrete. Solid, thick, and perfectly visible, once you looked up.
At first, she’d decided that she would be the one to ram through that ceiling, and she’d put all her energy to being so good at her job that they’d have no choice but to acknowledge her worth. As recently as the day before, that had been her plan. But she’d only given herself a concussion.
Though her heart jackhammered in her throat, Honor stood calmly. “I neither need nor want your reference, Silas. I thank you for making this decision so easy for me.”
She turned, walked steadily to the door, and left his office without looking back. All the way to the restroom, at the other end of the floor, she walked steadily, with her head high. Into the restroom, where she was alone.
Someday (Sawtooth Mountains Stories Book 2) Page 2