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“File it. If the judge doesn’t dismiss the case, offer them a settlement.”
Carmen’s eyes widened. “Elaine, you have no liability—”
“And the settlement will include that standard mumbo jumbo, I’m sure. I’m not taking the blame, Carmen. And I don’t care about winning anymore. About being right. This suit has been a total drain on my mental health and my peace. I can’t live in this muck for another however many years. I want to sail into the sunrise with my new bride and leave this behind. Make them an offer. I want to move on with my life, not waste precious time and energy fighting.”
When Elaine was gone, Carmen fell back into her chair. What the actual hell had that Fortune woman said to her?
Fortune Firestone… there was no way that was anyone’s real name. She opened a new email message and plugged in what little she knew before asking their firm’s investigator to conduct a thorough background check and bill it to her personal code.
A message dinged in her inbox while she was still typing. Diego, a senior associate, needed her to cover a hearing in Ft. Lauderdale. She glanced at the time. He’d generously given her three hours to prepare enough to stave off incompetence.
Rolling her eyes, she opened the notes attached to the email. It was a bullshit hearing that probably wouldn’t last half as long as it would take to drive from Miami to Ft. Lauderdale in afternoon traffic.
Closing her eyes, she leaned back in her chair. During law school, she’d kept herself motivated with notions of justice and honor, but that had somehow dwindled into mostly helping rich people stay rich. She worked ceaselessly, but was it toward anything meaningful?
Carmen turned toward the window, gazing out at the shimmering building next door as she traced a finger along the engraved quote on her desk plaque: “The first duty of society is justice.”
She thought of the pro bono clinic she’d volunteered at during law school, before profit margins and billable hours and grunt work. Back when her goal was empowering those without power.
Hadn’t that been her great-grandfather’s legacy? Would he have risked his life, and his children and grandchildren, for a motion to compel discovery in a tobacco case?
The questions were a tangle in her stomach while she typed back her response.On it.
Carmen straightened in her chair and got to work.
CHAPTER9
Sittingon a lawn chair in the front yard, the early June sun warming her skin, Lola scanned social media for prospects. Behind her was a small Spanish-style house in Miami’s snobby Coral Gables neighborhood. White stucco and terra cotta barrel tiles. The small square structure was crowned with a bright purple bougainvillea arching in front of the intricate, rounded-top wooden door.
Lola wasn’t going to waste time waiting for Starla to decide whether she was going to throw the career they’d worked so hard for into a pit of untreated sewage. Assuming the worst because people were only predictable in that way, she started working on finding her next client.
If she’d catapulted Starla up a few levels, she could do it again. This time, she’d invest her time in someone who was going to at least care as much as she did. That shouldn’t be so hard.
Lola had already looked at her slush pile of unsolicited resumes and headshots and demos. Not a single person jumped out as a star. They were all gray when what she needed was white hot.
Martina had probably taken all the good ones and shredded them. Or maybe she’d hidden them away, biding her time, waiting for the moment she grew from assistant to associate.
Lola scanned open mic opportunities, but she didn’t have much hope, so she went back to trekking through the endless ocean of desperate people trying to be noticed online. To have a brilliant moment of relevance they could tell their grandchildren about.
A pretty face slowed her flicking thumb. A pretty face had caught her eye, but it was her striking voice that kept it. The singer, who was making the most of the acoustics in her shower and of the innuendo that she was naked, was singing about falling in love with her boyfriend’s sister. An ode to bisexual disasters everywhere.
Dark eyes and black, curly hair dyed light brown at the tips, AfroCubanMamiForYerNerves had that special something. A gleam. A shine. A twinkle.
Lola went into her social media profile and learned that the woman who’d captivated her was named Kiki Villalobos. Kiki was a self-proclaimed first-generation Afro-Cuban pansexual woman who’d been born in the Bronx but lived in Miami since she was a toddler. Beautiful, charismatic, talented, and a quarter of a million followers that seem to engage with her every post, Kiki had that something. Star power. Or she could have it with Lola’s help.
Judging by the fact that Kiki didn’t have a website, no management listed on her page, and was still working as a pharmacy tech full time, she hadn’t found a way to do more with her talent than be#sponsored.
With no other way to communicate with her, Lola started drafting a DM. It wasn’t an optimal way to reach out, but sending the message from her verified profile, she expected that the obvious non-bullshit nature of her contact would be obvious.
She was still typing when the lawn company she hired slowed to a stop in the street in front of her. Mid-morning on a Wednesday, the crew of nearly a dozen arriving with two trucks full of plants was unremarkable.
“Ms. Barros?” the man with a blue polo and his company’s logo on the front said as he jogged up to her with an iPad in his hand.
His team, dressed in white long-sleeved shirts with the same logo, waited by the trucks. Lola wondered what they were waiting for. There was a lot of work to do, and they were juststanding there.
“I don’t usually come out with my guys,” he said, adjusting his branded baseball cap. “But the plans you sent over—”
“The ones I had professionally designed. Were they not clear?”
