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My mind flashes back to the first board meeting after my father’s death, and the moments after I proposed our growth into New York City and beyond. The vote had been one that united our team in a way my father had divided us. “I didn’t earn the respect I have by handing off cases that can make or break this firm’s reputation or a man’s future. I have to finish what I started.”
“You sold your apartment,” she reminds me. “You have to be out in three weeks. And I’m moving to Europe with the man of my dreams, which is not you.”
Not me. She’s right. It’s not. She’s a gorgeous redhead with green eyes, and had we met outside of work, where I keep my private life, I might have fucked her. But despite liking her as person, and working with her for five years now, I can say that a morning-after goodbye would have come easily with Ashley. Goodbye is always easy for me, or it was, until Lori.
“Cole?”
I blink with the realization that Ashley is talking and I’m not listening. “Yes?”
“What do you want to do?”
“Get the prison on the line,” I say. “I need to talk to my client.”
“You have a meeting with a potential client in New York in three days,” she reminds me, “and I put in your application to cross state lines. I know you. You’re going to want to take this case.”
“Are you sure you can’t move to New York over Europe and help launch the new offices?”
“Hmmm,” she says, a finger on her chin. “Let me think.” She drops her hand. “No. I am living in Paris for six months while my soon-to-be husband appraises art for the Louvre Museum. There’s no way to compete. Maybe when I get back.” She taps the file on my desk. “I’ll keep your hotel room in New York City. I assume I need to find you one here as well.”
“You assume correctly.”
She nods and heads for the door, and hesitates, turning to face me, “I’ve never seen you obsess over a woman before. I hope you find her or she finds you.”
She turns and leaves.
No hope to it, I think. I’m going to find her.
Lori
New York City, NY
I head home from my last day at the law firm, which is ironically on my birthday, and my mother has a big, “new job/happy birthday” cake baked for me, despite her having to work tonight. I walk up the narrow steps of the building leading to our floor, and once I’m at our door, I pause. I always pause at this moment to steel myself for the punch in the belly I feel when I walk inside and face our odd place, nice furnishings in the beat-up, tiny space; a reminder of what my mother had, what we had, and have lost. Still, today I do it with hope, I remind myself. I am now making ten grand a year more than I was a week ago. I’m up for this scholarship program. I have hope.
“I’m going to finish school and get my mother out of here,” I vow, before I open the door to be greeted by confetti and singing, compliments of my mother, and Marie Anne, our neighbor who is her dear friend. Both are wearing paper hats, and my mother, who is fifty-eight, and still stunning, is smiling brightly. Her hair is also colored a fresh brown, all the gray of the past six months gone, and she has on a nude-ish lipstick. Seeing her like this is the best birthday gift I could ever wish for.
“Happy birthday, honey,” she says, giving me a huge hug.
I hug her back and I don’t let go, reminded now of one of the many reasons that leaving Cole behind was necessary, and why I’m okay with that. She needs me, and I need her.
It’s not long, an hour later at most, and we’ve eaten chocolate cake, and my mother and Marie Anne have delighted over my new job. “Will you go back to Stanford to finish school?” Marie Anne asks.
“I think I’ll finish here at NYU,” I say.
This upsets my mother, and I don’t want her upset. She shakes her head. “No. You aren’t finishing here for me. I’m improving every day.”
“And she has me,” Marie Anne assures me.
“This is nothing to fret over,” I assure my mother, taking her hand. “The school might not even be my choice with this scholarship.”
“I want to say my daughter graduated from Stanford,” she insists.
“And you still might,” I assure her.
“And maybe you can get back with that Neal boy you were so into. I never even met him.”
“And you won’t,” I say since Neal, who wasn’t a boy, but rather a thirty-five-year-old attorney, who’d lectured at Stanford and later became my whatever he was—is also the man who told me I was a fool to quit school for my mother. And he never, ever made me feel any of the things I felt with Cole.
Nor would I have let him spank me.
