Page 48 of The Devil You Know

She laughs. “That’s just the worst when a man expresses interest in who you are as a person. What a dick.”

“I just don’t get it. I mean, I know it’s not going anywhere. He knows it’s not going anywhere. The milk is very clearly free so no need to buy the cow. Why wouldn’t he take the free milk?”

“Please stop talking about milk,” she says. I hear the beep of the vending machine—it’s seven in the morning and she’s already buying junk food. “It makes me think of cervical mucus, or breast milk. Maybe he just couldn’t perform again?”

“It’d been twenty-four hours, and he’s thirty-six. That’s not old enough for stuff to stop working, right?”

“He’s only thirty-six?” she shouts. “You said he was old! No, that’s not an age at which anything stops working.”

Which leaves me back at the drawing board, wondering why the hell he’s acting like this is more than it is.

I put on the red dress I discarded a few days ago and take it right back off. Nothing has changed in the two days since I decided red was the color of sex and I refuse to let Mr. Maybe-I-Wanted-to-Get-to-Know-You think I’m trying to seduce him. That ship has sailed.

I will take my free milk elsewhere. Fuck Ben. No more free milk. I’m putting it back on the shelf, in the paid marketplace.

I probably need to work on my analogies.

I get to the office and try to focus, but it’s a struggle. Every two seconds I’m picturing him looking at me last night—saying, “I want to be someone you trust enough to invite home.” And each time I think of it, I soften a little, but how long would those good intentions of his possibly last? I let him come over once, and then he keeps coming over, and the moment I decide to trust him is the moment he’ll decide to move on to something else.

I put my head down and focus on the Lawson case. I’ve found ten different employee reviews now of managers who got promoted despite “incidents”. It’s probably enough to get Margaret a decent settlement, but I want better than decent. I want a number so high that it gets the press’s attention and Fiducia is forced to publicly admit they fucked up. But how? Margaret said there were outings she hadn’t been invited to. Maybe it was discriminatory, or maybe Margaret is the pain in the ass they’ve implied she is, and they just didn’t want her along.

I call and she sounds excited to be hearing from me, which is unfortunate since I don’t have any especially good news. “How’s it going?” she asks.

Not as well as I’d like.

“Great,” I say. “But we need more, so I’ve got a quick question for you. You said there were a bunch of trips and nights out for staff that you weren’t invited to. Were other women invited? And do you know what they were doing?”

“Not as far as I know,” she replies. “It sounds like it was mostly drinking, but a girl in accounting told me they were always at strip clubs too.”

My foot starts to tap furiously. “Strip clubs,” I repeat. If someone in accounting knows about outings to strip clubs, that probably means they were submitted as an expense, yet there was no mention of them in the reports sent to us. “Would she talk to us?”

“I doubt it,” Margaret says. “She’s still there. She’d lose her job.”

“No one has to know,” I promise. “It would be completely, one hundred percent off the record.”

One hour later I’ve got a meeting set up with Leona, the woman in accounting. Ben’s out of the office, but I’m too excited not to tell him. I call, feeling the oddest tension inside me at the sound of his gravelly, “hello”—I don’t know if it’s fear or excitement.

“Are you busy?” I ask.

“I’m pretty busy,” he replies.

I roll my eyes. “You’re not that busy. You wouldn’t have answered if you were.” I quickly sum up the call with Leona and tell him she wants to meet at her house because she can’t afford to be seen with me.

“That’s amazing,” he says. “I’m in court all day, but I’ll be out of here by five.”

Oh. So, he actually is busy. And he still took my call.

I wouldn’t have taken his.

“You’re not going to convince her to testify,” I argue. “I’m capable of collecting facts on my own.”

“Are we certain about that? Because only one of us has made partner so far.”

I laugh. “You just love to throw that in my face.”

I can hear the smile in his voice. “I do. Mostly because you laugh, every fucking time.”

When we arrive at the address in Beverly Hills, Leona is waiting by the side gate. She leads us into the pool house she’s renting and takes the seat across from us. “I need you to promise this will never get out,” she says. “I can’t afford to lose my job right now, and they’d find a way to fire me, I assure you.”