remain calm. “What can I bring with me?”
“Just your personal effects, ma’am,” the agent answered. She was already disconnecting Sarah’s computer.
Sarah wanted to throw up. A group of her litigators and staff now stood clustered in her doorway, watching.
The agent pointed to Sarah’s purse. “Anything related to this firm’s cases in there?”
Sarah shook her head.
“How about in there?” the agent asked, pointing to Sarah’s laptop case.
This time Sarah nodded.
“You’ll have to leave those,” the agent said. “Let’s go through them.”
Sarah’s hands shook as she pulled out the files she had been working on the night before. The notes she’d made about the Motion to Dismiss she was going to work on all morning. Time sheets she had printed out for the past week to check her team members’ progress.
“Thank you, ma’am,” the agent said. “I’ll have to ask you to leave now.”
Sarah slung her purse over her shoulder, and picked up her laptop case.
“I’m sorry, you’ll have to leave the laptop,” the agent said.
“But . . . it has my personal information on it, too,” Sarah said. “Personal e-mails, financial records—”
“That’s fine,” the agent said. “We’ll return it to you when we’ve retrieved the information we need.”
Sarah’s face felt slick with sweat. She walked on wobbly legs to the door of her office.
“Sarah?” one of her team members said. “What are we going to do?”
Sarah shook her head. “It’s over,” she said, more to herself than to the other lawyer. Isn’t that what all this meant? she wondered. Wasn’t the entire career she worked so hard to build now suddenly and irrevocably over?
“Good luck,” she told the cluster of people watching her. She swallowed and forced herself to look each of them in the eyes. “I really mean that—good luck to all of you.”
The interview at the “command post” lasted approximately twenty minutes. The agent in charge asked whether Sarah had worked with a particular collection of lawyers at the firm, and whether she ever worked for a particular list of clients.
The only name she said yes to was the attorney who promoted her: Richard.
“Did you ever work directly with him for any of these clients?”
Sarah shook her head. She knew the client names, but they were too big and important for her to have been trusted with their files yet. Thank God.
The agent let her go, warning her they might need to be in touch again in the future.
Sarah nodded blankly. From what she counted as the agent read off the attorney names, there seemed to be twenty-two members of her firm involved. Almost all of them at the very top of the heap. Thank goodness no one from her own team had made it onto that list.
Sarah left the fourth floor, rode the elevator down to the garage, and then walked away from the life she had meticulously built from her first interview during her second year of law school.
No, she corrected herself as she shuffled toward her car—a car that would be confiscated within a week as the feds seized more of the firm’s assets—Sarah had just lost everything she’d worked for since she was a teenager. Since the night she helped her mom clean the insurance agency office, and saw the ad for a secretarial position the owners were planning to place the next morning. Sarah called as soon as they opened the next day and pretended she just happened to be looking for a job. She never told anyone at the agency that her mother was their cleaning woman, or that Sarah had been her helper since she was a little girl.
And now look at her, she thought that day: the little girl in her grown-up suit, turning the ignition on her grown-up car, holding back the flood of tears that she promised herself she could drown in as soon as she made it safely back to the sanctuary of her pretty little grown-up apartment.
Sarah’s heart had been broken twice in her life: first by Joe Burke, second by her job.
But maybe this chance she’d been given would help knit together the wounds from both. Get her back on her feet, earning money, building a fresh résumé once again.
And finally helping her erase whatever last vestiges of Joe Burke might still lay hiding in her heart. She’d thought there were none until she saw him that morning. Now she had to admit there were still splinters of him everywhere. She would find each one and pull it out. And in the end, even if it