by Tracy Wolff
“Funny, Mom, I pretty much just asked Brandon the same question.”
“Why would you do that to your brother? You know how hard he’s worked, how hard we’ve all worked and you’ve just gone and shot this campaign in the foot.”
More like the heart—a much more vital organ. But I don’t bother telling her that, not when she’s already so worked up. “You know why.”
“Over that girl?”
“You mean, my wife?”
“Seeing as how this is the first time you’ve bothered to inform me of your marriage, I don’t know what you expect me to say.”
“Exactly what you’re saying, Mom. Now ask me what I want you to say.”
There’s a long silence on the other side of the line. “I know you think you love this girl—”
“I do love her.”
“But you can’t just throw away everything this family has worked for,” she continues. “I don’t know what it is about Chloe Girard that both of my boys have felt the need to sleep with her, but you’ll get over her, just like your brother did—”
“You didn’t just say that. Brandon didn’t sleep with Chloe, Mom. He raped her.”
“So she says.”
“So a lot of women say.” I pause, try to calm myself down. “Did you really think I wouldn’t find out about the others?”
“The others don’t matter. Their claims weren’t any more truthful than Chloe’s were. You, of all people, should know how these things happen.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means women look to rich men for handouts. If they don’t get them one way, they’ll get them another.”
“Really? Because I managed to make it this long without ever being accused of rape by anyone, let alone by eight women.”
“Then you should count yourself lucky.”
“And here I thought it was basic human decency on my part. Besides, I don’t think I’m the one who’s been lucky so far in this equation.”
“Frankly, Ethan, I don’t really care what you think right now. You’re letting yourself be led around by the nose by that woman and it needs to stop. You’ve gotten your revenge. You’ve made a huge mess for your brother and now it’s time to clean it up.”
“I’ve only just started, Mom. It gets way messier from here.”
“Why are you doing this?” She sounds as bewildered as she is frustrated and I can’t help but wonder what’s going through her head right now. And what’s been in her head all along? She wasn’t always like this—or at least, I don’t think she was. I remember when I was a kid and my father was still alive, she was a pretty decent person. Sure, a little more cold than most of the other women on the block, but still decent. Still capable of understanding rape as something more than an inconvenience that needs to be dealt with.
“The better question is why aren’t you doing this?” I finally ask. “Why isn’t someone doing this? Brandon is a monster. I’m willing to admit that I gave him too much, did too much for him. Why can’t you?”
“Your brother is a good man. He—”
“My brother is a spoiled, self-indulgent, conscienceless sociopath. He does what he wants, takes what he wants, and to hell with anyone else. He makes a mess everywhere he goes and you and I have been there his whole life cleaning up after him. I’m done making excuses for him and I’m done cleaning up his messes.”
“He’s your younger brother. He’s your responsibility—”
“Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think that’s what keeps me up at night? The idea that I am somehow responsible for the weak, pathetic excuse for a man that he’s become?”
“Your father would be so ashamed of you.”
“I don’t think I’m the one he’d be ashamed of in this conversation.”
“You think he’d accept you talking to me like this?”
“Maybe not. But he sure as hell wouldn’t accept me covering up for a rapist, so I’ll take the lesser of the two crimes.”
“That’s enough!” she snaps, her voice ringing with an authority I haven’t heard from her since I was a teenager. “You’re going to fix this, Ethan.”
“You’re damn right I am. But I’m not sure you and I share the same definition of what fixing this entails.”
“Let me rephrase myself, then, so there are no misunderstandings. You are going to fix the mess you just made for your brother, or I am. It’s your choice how it happens, but it will happen.”
“You’re welcome to try to go up against me on this.”
“Oh, I’ll do more than try. By the time I’m done, they’ll be ready to elect your brother president. But I guarantee, you won’t like the way I do it.”
For the first time since I picked up the phone, a frisson of unease works its way down my spine. “Are you threatening me, Mom?”
“I’m reminding you that you aren’t the only one in this family who has political and economic capital to spend. You might be the son of a hero, but I was married to one. Remember that.”
“You divorced my father in the middle of the whole PTSD thing. I think that ship has sailed.”
“I divorced him because he asked me to. The PTSD was so bad he was worried about hurting you and he begged me to take you away so you would be safe. Leaving him was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”
I have to admit it’s a good story. Maybe even a great story, if I’m being honest. But that’s all it is, though. A story. “You don’t actually think that will fly, do you? You know, there’s this new thing called the internet. It lets you look up just about anything in the course of a couple minutes. Your story won’t survive the first spin.”
“You’d be surprised. The tearful widow of an American hero gets a lot of sympathy—even years later. And when her son has obviously lost his mind over a whore who tried once before to ruin his family…” The implied threat hangs in the air before she continues, “You obviously aren’t afraid to use your influence to cause damage. Don’t think for one second that I’ll be afraid to use mine to clean up after you. I’ll give you forty-eight hours to fix this mess.”
“Or what?”
Jesus. Every time I think I can breathe, every time I think the rage has calmed down enough that I can function, one of them does something like this and any false calm I’ve managed to talk myself into goes up in flames.
“Or I’ll do it for you. And I won’t be nearly as discriminating as you are about who gets hurt.”
“This isn’t going to end the way you want it to, Mom.” Unconsciously, I echo Chloe’s words.
“Funny, Ethan, I was just about to tell you the same thing. Fix it.”
And then she’s gone, and I’m left staring into the night, hands clenched on the steering wheel, brain circling through a million different scenarios—none of them good.
This, I want to tell Chloe, is what I get for doing things her way. For not hitting Brandon with everything I have and basically presenting it to my mother—and the world—as a fait accompli.
This, I want to tell Chloe, isn’t the end. It’s only the opening salvo.
Chapter 17
I’m at work early today. It’s partly because I’m overloaded—my boss’s way of dealing with the mess that is my employment history for the last couple of months (the fact that I slept with the boss, broke up with the boss, quit, came back and am now Ethan’s wife) is apparently to drown me in work and see if I complain—and partly because I miss Ethan. The house feels too big without him in it. Big and empty and off. So off.
I hate that I feel that way. After all, I never thought I’d be one of those women who slept better simply because she had a man beside her in bed. One of those women who needed a man to function. I never used to be that kind of woman. And I never wanted to be.
To put it in perspective, though, none of this is about having a man. All of it is about having my man. It’s an important distinction. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself.
Ethan called me from the airpor
t in the middle of the night, right before his plane took off at four a.m. Boston time. They were supposed to leave earlier—he’d promised yesterday morning that he’d be home to wake me up today—but a storm rolled in right before midnight and it kept them grounded until conditions cleared.
It should have put my mind at ease that his pilot was being so careful—too many people die in small plane crashes—and it did, on that front. But after his call, I just couldn’t sleep. I ended up aimlessly wandering his house for hours, trying to figure out why I felt so unsettled. Ethan had sounded fine. He’d said all the right things, done all the right things. Had sounded happy to be talking to me, and even happier to be coming home. And still, there’s a part of me even now, hours later, that’s rattled and uncertain. A part that knows something isn’t quite right.
It’s not a stretch, I don’t think, that I immediately thought of Brandon. I tried to ask him how his meeting with his brother went, but he brushed me off. Told me everything was fine. I would have pushed a little more if he was alone, but I knew he had a number of his executives on board with him and the last thing he needed was to discuss this whole mess in front of them.
So I hung up the phone and roamed the halls of Ethan’s—of our—too big house, worried and waiting for the other shoe to drop. So far it hasn’t, but it’s barely seven a.m. There’s a lot of day left to burn.
Not that I’m going to let myself dwell on that, any more than I’m going to watch the clock count down the minutes until I can see Ethan. He should have landed a little while ago and I’m sure I’ll be the first one to know when he gets to Frost Industries. Not that I can take off work to go see him, because the last thing I need is one more strike against me with my boss and the other interns, but if he gets here early enough—before the office fills up—maybe I can steal a couple minutes with him.
Still, it’s nerve-wracking sitting here, jumping at every sound and watching the minute hand move slowly around the dial of my watch. So I do my best to concentrate on work instead. Now that the Trifecta merger I spent my first weeks of employment working on is pretty much a done deal, I’ve got a new case to research. Well, several new cases. But only one that really excites me.
A case of patent infringement is being leveled against Frost Industries by a group of people I am pretty sure are patent trolls, looking for nothing so much as a quick payoff before moving on to file a case against the next company. I’ve done some research on them, and though this grouping of people is brand new, each member of the plaintiff’s suit has been involved in at least one other lawsuit in the last two years. Four of them have been involved in three or more.
The lawsuit in question claims that a medical software program created by Frost Industries’s software R&D department infringes on ideas that they had already patented. Which is ridiculous on so many levels—the most important being that it’s impossible to patent abstract ideas. People have been trying to do it for generations and they’ve been slapped down over it again and again and again by district courts, by federal courts of Appeals, and—as recently as 2013—by the US Supreme Court itself. Many of the recent decisions have dealt, specifically, with software claims just like this one.
And still Ethan has to defend himself against the lawsuit, which means copious hours of research and depositions and court time. Since I’m not a lawyer, I won’t get to see most of what goes on—unless Ethan shares it with me. However, I’ve got mad research skills, so I’m one of two interns in charge of researching precedent for this case.
On the plus side, it’s interesting work that engages my mind, keeps me busy and helps me to protect my husband. On the downside, the other intern I’m working with—Rick—hates me and has pretty much from the day I walked into this place and ended up landing the Trifecta merger that he so badly wanted. Now that I’m Ethan’s wife, things have only gotten worse between us. I try to ignore him, to keep my head up and my ire down, but some days it’s not so easy. Especially when he takes potshots, not just at me, but at Ethan as well.
But I can’t do anything about that, I tell myself viciously as I settle down to work. Any more than I can will Ethan’s plane to land faster or his car to get here more quickly. Or Brandon to disappear off the face of the fucking earth. Believe me, I’ve tried that one before, about a million and one times. All to no avail.
But I’m not going to go there right now. No use in dwelling on something I can’t change—at least not until I get all the facts from Ethan. Which is why, even though it’s barely seven in the morning, I open up FindLaw, one of the big legal databases in the country, and start combing the judge’s decision on the most recent case about idea patenting.
It doesn’t take long before I’m completely immersed. After all, the whole reason I wanted to get into patent law was because I thought big corporations were taking advantage of small, independent inventors—stealing their ideas for practically nothing and then making a fortune off them. It happened to my brother, Miles, once when I was in junior high and he was in college and it had devastated him. Not to mention it had pretty much bankrupted my family since my dad had invested heavily in Miles’s idea, the failure of which sent us on the collision course with Brandon that ended up with me raped, beaten and signing papers that recanted my statement in exchange for the money my family needed to recover from the theft.
The whole point of being a patent lawyer is helping out people like my brother—but I think maybe I also got into it so that what happened to me doesn’t happen to anybody else, ever. If someone had asked me a year ago if that was the reason I wanted to be an attorney, I would have told them they were way off. But now, looking at it after having met Ethan and lived through all the shit we’ve been faced with, I’m forced to admit that maybe there’s a part of me that’s in it so that no other girl gets sold out because her parents were ripped off and they need the money.
Maybe it’s not the most businesslike or the most professional answer, but it’s my answer and I’m learning to embrace it.
This case I’m on—the one claiming Ethan infringed on what is, in essence, an abstract idea, is being worked by me and two other interns, as well as a supervisory attorney. I’m in charge of researching precedent and I couldn’t be more thrilled. Some people find spending hours upon hours amid legal texts to be boring, but I love it. I love the order of it, love the power of the decisions handed down.
I’m not sure how long I work—long enough that the office starts to come alive around me. Corporate attorneys are notoriously early risers, so some of them started wandering in not long after I got here. But by the time I stand up to stretch out my back and shoulders, the paralegals, assistants and interns are all here, too.
A couple of the interns are walking down the path in between the cubicles as I twist around. I make eye contact with one of them—a girl named Chrissy who was actually pretty nice to me my first couple days here. I smile tentatively and she looks uncomfortable, jerks her eyes away and actually lowers her head down as she passes my cubicle.
Yeah. That’s pretty much how it’s been for weeks now. Don’t know why I keep trying. It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve been a social pariah…only this time, I refuse to hide.
I’m not a scared fourteen-year-old anymore.
When Ethan talked me into coming back to work, I knew I would be in for this. And I decided it was worth it—because I need the work experience for my law school application and because I really enjoy what I do here. Besides, who cares if the people in my own department don’t like me? I still have Ro and Zayn and Austin, all interns from R&D. They’re the coolest friends a girl could ask for.
Deciding now is as good a time as any for a break, I slide my phone into my pocket—in case Ethan calls—and then grab my purse from my drawer. After a quick trip to the restroom, I detour by the break room to fill up my water bottle and grab an apple from the fruit bowl that’s always full. A couple turns around the building’s main lobby area to stretch my legs and I head back to m
y cubicle, doing my best to ignore the numerous stares I get along the way.
But when I get to my cubicle, I figure out that there’s a reason for the stares. Ethan is leaning back in my chair, feet up on my desk and eyes closed. He looks utterly exhausted. So exhausted, that for a second I think about just leaving him right where he is for a few minutes. But then he opens his eyes and the look in them makes my heart sink.
Determined to keep it light—partly because he looks like he needs it and partly because I’m pretty sure half the floor is currently eavesdropping—I perch myself on the corner of my desk and ask softly, “Whatcha doing, Mr. Frost?”
The darkness fades as quickly as it came. “Visiting my wife, Mrs. Frost.” He stands up, rolling himself out of the chair in a way that makes my palms sweat just to watch. It’s ridiculous how well my husband can move…and how much it turns me on just to watch him.
He cups my jaw, drops a quick kiss on my lips. Then uses his thumb to rub gently against the frown lines that crease my cheeks. “You all right, baby?”
I drop my voice even lower. “I’m good. Just worried about you. How was your trip?”
“It was fine. Pretty uneventful, workwise. We got everything accomplished that we set out to do.”
I nod, then brush a hand through his hair that’s gone from shaggy to officially too long sometime in the last two weeks. Somehow it makes him look even hotter, even more dangerous. I like it. “What about the nonwork stuff? That go okay, too?”
His jaw tightens almost imperceptibly, but he just nods. “It’s getting there.”
“Yeah?” Not like I expect him to give me any details while we’re standing in the middle of a very busy office, but still I feel the need to check on him. To make sure he’s okay with however things played out with Brandon.
“Absolutely.” He gives me another quick kiss, this one on my forehead. “I know you’re busy, so I won’t keep you. Come by my office when you get off tonight. I’ll drive you home.”