still got stung once in awhile, but that wasn’t the issue that landed his practice in the hole it was now. That happened because he’d rolled the dice on a big case—his “breakthrough case.” The Wheeler trial.
The breakthrough case: the one that catapulted your career to a new level. If you were an associate at a big firm, it generated the huge fees that made partnership a certainty. Out on your own, it was the case that made the rest of your career a choice. Some lawyers never saw one; others didn’t have the guts to seize one and hang on when it came along. Because, as Jared had just proved this past summer, the flip side of winning a breakthrough case was losing one—for him, eighteen months of work without fees and a dry well for a bank account.
There was a cough. Jared looked up to Jessie, holding out a pair of pink slips. “Phone calls for you.”
The first slip said Clay Strong. “What’s it about?”
“Don’t know. But he said it was urgent.”
The second slip was Sandra Wheeler.
“Are you going to call Mrs. Wheeler back?” Jessie asked, raising her eyebrows.
“No. Not now. I’ve already told her we won’t know anything on the appeal for months yet.”
Jessie brushed back some strands of hair from her eyes and nodded in agreement, but Jared could see she wanted to speak.
“What is it?”
“You told me there’s almost no chance of overturning the jury verdict in her case.”
“So?”
“So why not drop the appeal? Tell her it’s over.”
That would be the simplest; just surrender and move on. It was something he’d never done. One of Clay Strong’s first lessons as Jared’s mentor was that taking on a case, like marriage, was “for better or for worse.”
“No,” he answered, “I don’t think so.”
There was worry in Jessie’s eyes, but she shrugged noncommittally and left the room.
The late-afternoon sun had dipped below his window when Jared set aside the last folder on his desk and looked wearily around the office. Shadows from the building next door left the room’s light soft and gray.
His eyes stopped on a small stack of files on the sofa. There was some work there, but not a case among them had more than a thousand dollars of legal work.
Things were different before he took Sandra Wheeler as a client. Back then, his practice had momentum—steady litigation referrals from other attorneys, regular clients coming back for follow-up work. Then he took the Wheeler case. For over a year and a half, his regular clients’ work got stretched out. Calls got put off.
With too few exceptions, his clients found lawyers elsewhere—attorneys who returned their messages the same day, instead of later in the week or not at all. If not for a few loyal clients he’d brought over from Paisley—like Stanhope Printing, a company he’d represented since it was a startup—Jared wondered if he could have kept the office open.
When he got things built back up again, Jared promised himself, he wouldn’t touch another Wheeler case. Too much risk. Too much pain.
Speaking of which—Jared rotated his neck to loosen a kink tightening toward a headache. Jared just wanted to go home and lie down. He reached for his coat on the client chair next to his desk, when something pink caught his eye. He bent and picked it up. It was the slip from Clay Strong, the urgent one. When had they spoken last? At least six months.
He couldn’t afford to miss a possible referral from his old mentor. Jared sat back down in his chair and dialed the number.
3
Footfalls passed in the hall outside Clay’s office door. Jared’s watch showed it was after eight in the evening. The gunners, he thought: young associates making sure Clay knew they were still around. Courtiers to the king. He’d bet the keys to his car that they’d be here until Clay drove away.
Jared felt his fatigue settling into his bones. He looked at Clay, seated behind his enormous desk, feet resting on a side chair. A box of Cuban Montecristos perched at the desk edge. A single cigar nested in the corner of the man’s mouth. The world was upside down. Clay, finishing the final touches on a brief, was twenty-five years older and brimming with energy Jared could not imagine just now.
Cigar lit, Clay puffed shredded smoke rings toward the ceiling as he worked. When you own the building, who was going to complain?
Jared’s gaze swept Clay’s office, seeing the oil paintings and custom-made mahogany