Judgment

23

While Duncan was downstairs watching TV, Juliana went to the bedroom to read more of the Wheelz chats. She’d closed the door so she couldn’t hear the TV. She needed to be in her own head.

She had a pile of the documents on her lap, and at first she just skimmed through the chats, dipping in here and there in no particular order. But soon she found herself in the zone, focused, and she started reading them in chronological order. She was following Rachel Meyers’s short career at Wheelz.

She was surprised to see that barely two weeks or so after starting at Wheelz, Rachel was already in conversation with the CEO. Their first exchange began with an invitation by Allerdyce.

No surprise that the CEO wanted to talk with his new general counsel. But a couple of hours later Allerdyce contacted her again to change the plan.

Madrigal was famous, the most expensive restaurant in Boston. Juliana had been there once and remembered their copper menus and the superpricey wine list. Madrigal was a major change in venue — from a meeting in his office to a meeting over dinner at an over-the-top restaurant. That altered the dynamic of the meeting quite a bit, and Rachel must have known it.

An hour later he messaged her to change the time.

The next exchange between Allerdyce and Rachel came the next morning. Clearly something had happened between the two of them, something awkward.

Whatever had transpired between the two of them, it was never mentioned again, as far as she could see in the chats. “No problem,” she’d told him, after whatever had happened the night before. Words that would no doubt come back to haunt her if they went to trial. Though she probably had said “no problem” because she was talking to the CEO of the company, no matter how she really felt.

Then she found a chat between Rachel Meyers and someone in the company named Karen Heraty, who was probably a friend.

She thought about the powerlessness that Rachel Meyers must have felt, the relentlessness of her boss’s boss. The arrogance of the guy, the sense of privilege, assuming his beautiful new general counsel would be interested in him sexually — or would at least relent — because he was the founder, the boss.

Well, that sure as hell wasn’t new. She’d had to deal with all kinds of crap when she started working as a lawyer. She would never be sure why, for instance, she didn’t get that associate job at the law firm where she interned one summer, where Spence Murchison, a senior partner, kept hitting on her until he gave up, embittered. “My boyfriend wouldn’t like it,” she’d deflected with a fake smile. But her heart was pounding, and her face was hot. She didn’t have a boyfriend.

The firm didn’t hire her, and she’d never know why. Were the other applicants just stronger? Maybe. Or did Spence Murchison decide it would be too uncomfortable to have her around?

She just took it for granted that you had to deal with all that crap. Her male colleagues never had to.

Juliana put down the stack of documents. So far nothing she’d read gave her any indication of who might be blackmailing her, who it was who so badly wanted to keep the chats from being made public.

She switched off her bedside lamp, and the bedroom went black. I’m in the dark, she thought. I’m still in the dark.