The House Girl Read Free Page B

She’d once heard him scream at a paralegal who’d stapled a document in the wrong corner.
    Dan paused, then blinked again, faster this time. “Oh, yeah. Thanks, Lina. I remember—the brief. You’re a little late.” He glanced down at his watch (gold, glistening). “Throw it here on my desk.” He pointed his chin vaguely toward the left. “So how did it come out?”
    Lina hesitated, remembering those frozen moments in her office, her sense that something remained incomplete, undiscovered. But here, standing on Dan’s expansive carpet, breathing the vaguely fragranced air (mint? licorice?) that seemed to permeate only the partners’ offices, she pushed away any hint of uncertainty. “I’m very happy with it,” she said. “The argument is persuasive. And I’m confident we’ve covered all the relevant case law.”
    “I’m sure it’s great—your work always is.” Dan paused, and then half-whispered, “You know, I probably shouldn’t be telling you before the others, but we settled yesterday.”
    “Settled? Yesterday?” A coolness ran through Lina, starting at her eyebrows and ending at her toes, as though something warm and alive were departing her body.
    “The client’s been working on a deal for weeks. They signed the papers last night.” Dan beamed. No trial, no possibility of defeat. The perfect win record, still intact.
    “What about …?” and Lina circled her hand in the air to indicate the brief she had just completed, the twelve sets of exhibit files copied and bound, the witnesses flown in from L.A. and London, the thirty-odd people working feverishly upstairs, their eyes red, their vacations canceled, their carpals tunneled. What about all of that?
    “Yeah, I’ll go up soon to share the good news. Got some stuff to finish off down here first.” Dan examined a hangnail. “You know, it’s always a good idea to wait until the ink is dry before you pull the plug.”
    “But our position was so strong.” Lina shifted in place, tucked a restless lick of dark hair behind one ear. “So how much was the settlement?”
    “Two-fifty.” Dan lowered his gaze to the floor as he said this.
    “Two-fifty! Jesus, Dan, that won’t even cover the legal fees. We were right . We would have won.”
    Dan paused, tilted his head, and in the brief silence Lina read his disapproval, not of the settlement figure but of her outburst, her indignation. Rash. Unprofessional. She gave a chastised little nod.
    “ Probably we would have won,” Dan said. “But you know, litigation is messy. It takes a long time. The client just didn’t have the stomach for it. They’re happy, Lina. They’re satisfied.” He exhaled long and low. “Look, this is what happens. I know, it’s tough. You get caught up in a case, you want to go in there and win. But remember, the client calls the shots. We do their bidding. This isn’t about us, it isn’t about emotion or any sort of absolute … justice, or whatever you want to call it. At the end of the day it’s about the client’s best interest. What does the client want? What’s best for their bottom line?”
    As Dan spoke, Lina’s gaze shifted to the darkened glass of his monstrous windows. Her own image reflected back: her blouse flared white, her hair a dark helmet, her face cast in shadow, the features indistinct, her body truncated and shorter (surely) than she actually was. And something in the position of her head, or the way the image seemed poised, hovering, disconnected from any solid ground, reminded Lina of the photo of her mother that sat beside her bed at home: Grace Janney Sparrow, dead when Lina was four, standing with bare arms and a forced smile on the steps of the house where Lina and her father still lived. In that photo, Lina’s mother was square-shouldered, cock-kneed, paused, waiting —Lina had always wondered, what was she waiting for?—in just the way Lina was standing now.
    Lina straightened, shifted in place, and her mother’s image