Breed Read Free Page A

sounds like what she is: a woman carrying fifty extra pounds.
    Alex narrows his eyes at Jim, causing the father-to-be to shift his weight and his glance—he is the very definition of shifty .
    “Well, if you have some great new doctor or something,” Alex says, “I wish you’d tell us. We’re really at the end of our rope. And, honestly, Jim, I think we have a right to know. At the very least—” Alex pokes Jim lightly in the stomach. “Professional courtesy, right?”
    “We’re actually not able to do that,” Jim says. “It’s complicated.”
    “Complicated?” Alex says, as if the word itself were absurd. “Try us.”
    “Oh, come on, Alex, we’re fine,” Leslie says. This is far from her idea of how to get information out of people—she would invite them over, serve them a brilliant meal with wonderful wine.
    “I’ll tell you what, old friend,” Jim says to Alex, his smile as cold as a zipper. “With a young’un on the way, the mind turns to practical matters. Make me a partner in your law firm and I’ll tell you exactly what we did to make this happen.” Jim pats his wife’s stomach while their little dog begins to yip impatiently.
    The men’s eyes lock. It is just now dawning on Alex that this meeting might not be a total coincidence. The Johnsons might well have known that he and Leslie would be coming out of Fertilize-Her at this time and crossing the park on their way to the Upper East Side. And as these thoughts form themselves in Alex’s mind, Jim seems to be nodding his head as if to say That’s right, you’re figuring it out.
    “I might see my way clear to offering you a position, but I’m certainly not able to offer a partnership,” Alex says, with such seriousness that both of the women turn toward Jim, like people in a stadium watching a tennis match.
    “I would need some guarantee that a partnership was at least possible.”
    “In the world of business, everything is possible,” Alex says.
    “All right, then,” Jim says.
    “It’s a deal,” Alex says. He extends his hand. Jim offers his own in return but slowly, suddenly shy. Alex further extends his own reach and seizes Jim’s hand. It looks to Leslie like a big fish eating a small fish. “Come see me at nine o’clock tomorrow.”
    “I have an appointment at nine tomorrow,” Jim says.
    “Break it,” Alex advises. Though he is ostensibly the supplicant in this matter, he has seized control of the situation nevertheless.
     
    Throughout his career, Alex has always been the first person to the office, generally arriving between six and six thirty in the morning. When he began at the firm, the other young lawyers with whom he was presumably in competition secretly nicknamed him Eager Alex and Alexander Daybreak, but now he is a partner and he continues to arrive before the other partners, the other lawyers, the paralegals, the secretaries, the receptionist, and the mail-room workers. The only people he sees when he enters the Bailey, Twisden, Kaufman, and Chang offices on Fifty-Ninth and Madison are the security guards in the lobby—a recent addition to the building, since the attack on Lower Manhattan two years before—and the cleaners, who on most days are leaving with their buckets and mops and brooms and plastic bags filled with wastepaper just as Alex is walking in, dressed in his bespoke suit, his Turnbull and Asser shirt, and his Crockett and Jones shoes, which he polishes himself.
    As usual, Alex uses the early-morning hours at his desk to clear away any lingering paperwork, to make little notes to himself about whatever cases or contracts he is working on, and to simply collect his thoughts, without the distraction of ringing phones, pinging e-mails, and other people. By nine o’clock, Alex feels well on top of his work. He is standing at the office’s espresso machine—a gift from a well-known pop singer, thanking the firm for its pro bono work on behalf of the singer’s chauffeur—when the first