Chapter 149 THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS - 32

Chapter 149 THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS - 32
VIVENNE

I have no right to be upset.
That's the thing I keep coming back to, because I am a logical person with a functioning brain and a law degree and approximately eight years of experience making airtight arguments, and the argument here is airtight. I asked for space. Space is what I got. Space, by definition, means a person gets to live their life without checking with you first, and living your life sometimes involves being a tall, stunning woman who comes out of a man's flat laughing at something over her shoulder and gets her car door held open for her.
I asked for this. I got what I asked for. These are facts and I know they are facts and I've been furious since Thursday evening and I cannot for the life of me find a logically defensible place to aim it, which is maybe the most annoying feeling I've ever had and I once spent three hours in an airport that lost my luggage but this does not even compare.
I'm not even furious at him. That would be easier. That would give it somewhere to go. I'm furious at myself, mostly, for going over there in the first place, for sitting in that spot with my hand on the door handle rehearsing opening lines like a person who had any idea what they were doing, for the fact that watching a beautiful stranger get into his car hurt in a way the entire board situation never did. That tells me something about my own feelings that I've spent four days actively refusing to sort through.
So I went to work.
Shola and I had a prep session Monday morning that ran two hours over because opposing counsel had filed something that required immediate attention, and by the time we surfaced it was past noon and I'd been so completely inside the documents that I hadn't thought about Thursday evening once. Four hours. Four hours is something I’ll have you know.
"You're doing the thing," Shola said while we were waiting for the printer.
"What thing."
"The thing where you schedule yourself into oblivion so you don't have to be a person."
"I'm preparing for a bloody case Ola, sue me."
"You've colour-coded the secondary exhibits."
"The secondary exhibits needed colour-coding."
"Vivienne." She leaned against the wall with her coffee and looked at me the way she'd started looking at me since I joined her firm, like she was perpetually mildly concerned but had decided amusement was a more efficient response. "You reorganized the entire shared drive on Saturday. It was Saturday."
"The shared drive was a disaster."
"It was fine."
"No it wasn’t."
She opened her mouth and closed it. "I can't actually argue with that because the folders were genuinely bad. But that's not the point.
The printer jammed. We both looked at it.
"The point," she continued, pulling the paper out with the resigned efficiency of someone who had made peace with this machine's particular deficiencies, "is that you've said you're fine, and ‘fine’ people don't colour-code secondary exhibits at eight in the morning."
"But you know I colour-code everything."
"Not the secondary exhibits. You usually leave those to me."
I took the papers she'd wrestled out of the printer. "I'm delegating upward. It's a management strategy."
"It looks like avoidance to me," she sing-songed, and went back to her desk, and I stood there for a second because she wasn't wrong and I find it deeply inconvenient when Shola isn't wrong.
The Langston case was going smoothly. That part was really good news and had nothing to do with anything except eight months of work finally catching a break, a financial trail the audit had shaken loose that opposing counsel hadn't expected us to have and was now visibly unhappy about. Priya had sent me three exclamation point texts about it Friday morning, which from Priya was the equivalent of anyone else setting off a fireworks display.

"This is it Viv!" she said in the doorway of my office Tuesday afternoon, holding a printout like a trophy. "This is the actual fucking thing. They didn't expect us to get here."
"But we got here."
"We got here." She looked at the printout again. "Also you look terrible."
"Shola said the same thing."
"Shola's perceptive." She sat down across from me, not letting go of the printout. "Are you going to tell me what happened or are we doing the thing where I figure it out through inference over the next two weeks."
"Inference is more efficient. Cuts out the middle step."
"The middle step is me pretending I don't already know it's about Cole Westbrook."
I looked at her. She looked back.
"I drove to his building," I said. "Thursday. After the report filed."
"Oh, Viv."
"I didn't get out of the car."
"Why not?"
"Because he came out with someone."
The office went quiet for a second. "And… you don't know who she was," she said.
"I mean I… I know what she looked like."
"That's not the same thing."
"It felt the same, feels the same."
She didn't say anything for a moment. Then: "Did you at least try to find out who she is?."
I said nothing.
"Vivienne."
"I looked at his Instagram."
"And?"
"He posts approximately twice a year. Both times it was a company announcement. He's essentially a ghost." I paused. "I then looked at LinkedIn."
"Obviously."
"There's nothing there either. Just professional content. Not a single tagged photo, not a name, nothing that helps."
"So you learned nothing."
"I learned that Cole Westbrook has the social media presence of a man who was specifically advised by a PR team to be boring online, which honestly I respect professionally and find deeply unhelpful personally." I picked up my pen and put it down. "I also looked at Jordan's Instagram because Jordan is the opposite of Cole and posts everything."
Priya made a face that meant she was trying not to laugh. "And?"
"Jordan was at a thing Thursday evening. Many pictures. Cole is not in any of them, which means he wasn't with Jordan, which tells me nothing except that Jordan went to a thing and had a great time and documents his life like a person who enjoys being perceived."
"So your investigation..."
"Was not a success."
"Right." She stood up and picked the printout back up because life went on and the Langston case wasn't going to celebrate itself. "You know what I think?"
"I never know what you think, you're very spontaneous."
"I think you drove to his building for something that’s obviously not work-related. Which means you'd already decided something." She stopped in the doorway. "The woman at the door doesn't change what you decided. It just scared you. Those are two different problems."
She left before I could come up with a response, which I'm increasingly convinced is a deliberate tactic.
His text came through at eight that evening. Just a photo, no caption. A gas station coffee machine with a handwritten OUT OF ORDER sign taped crookedly to the front. Sad, resigned, completely defeated-looking.
I laughed out loud in my empty flat, alone, like an idiot, with nobody to witness it.
I picked up the phone to call him. Got as far as his name on the screen and his number ready to dial and sat there with my thumb over the green button for a moment that stretched longer than it should have.
Sent a laughing emoji instead.
Put the phone on the coffee table. Picked it back up and looked at the photo again because it was actually very funny and the sign's handwriting had clearly given up halfway through the word "order."
Fuck, am I pathetic?