Page 11 of The Devil You Know

“That wasn’t especially friendly,” he says, sliding in beside me.

“We’re not friends.” I look out the window to avoid the questions I know are coming. No way will he let this go.

“Are you going to tell me what she did, or should I run back over and ask her?”

My stomach tightens. I open my phone. “Go ask her,” I say, as if distracted. “I’ll wait.” I’m banking on the fact that even Ben isn’t that shameless. I hope I’m right.

“Gemma,” he says with a sigh. “Come on.”

“We worked together at Stadler Helms,” I tell him. And she was, once upon a time, my closest friend.

He blinks in surprise. “When were you at Stadler? I thought you came to FMG straight out of law school.”

I cross my legs then tap one dangling heel impatiently. His eyes dart to my foot then away.

“I was a summer associate,” I reply, though summers only represent a fraction of the time I spent there. “If you’re done asking about my personal life, I’d like to review my notes.”

“They didn’t make you an offer?” he asks, and my God I regret I ever told him anything. Because that’s the red flag, isn’t it? No one with my work history at Stadler isn’t made an offer without having done something very wrong.

And no one gets their offer rescinded without having done something even worse.

“I have no idea how you made partner,” I reply, opening my notes, and he gives up at last.

Attacking, as always, is the best defense.

I’ve been using it to keep Ben away now for two years straight.

7

Meg had been an associate at Stadler for a few years by the time Kyle arrived, and I’d been there nearly as long, working part-time during law school. She was technically my boss, but no one would have guessed this based on our conversations, which were mostly about parties, clothes, and boys. Lately they’d been focused on one boy, Kyle Cabrera, though referring to a thirty-five-year-old partner at our law firm as a boy seemed a little ridiculous.

He was only working out of the LA office temporarily. Needless to say, we hoped he’d make it permanent. “He looks more like a Navy SEAL in a good suit than an attorney,” Meg whispered when we first saw him walking down the hall. She was not wrong.

For two weeks, he’d been the sole focus of my group chat with her and another associate. Every tiny bit of info gleaned was collected secretively and mulled over, as if we were members of an underground resistance movement.

Me: He works out at Equinox every night, apparently. On a scale of 1-10, how stalkerish would it be to purchase a gym membership I can’t afford and *happen* to show up there?

Meg: As you have no intent to do harm (I assume), I think you’re okay. Send photos.

Me: Hell, no. Get your own gym membership for that. Besides, I know what YOU’D want pics of and I’m not sneaking into the men’s changing room for you.

Kirsten: I bet it’s HUGE. You wouldn’t even need a long-range lens.

Me: This conversation is so wrong. We still don’t even know if he’s married.

We’d checked into it, of course. He didn’t wear a ring, and his bio said he was a father of two but didn’t mention a spouse.

“There’s no way,” Kirsten said. “No wife is letting that guy go across the country for months at a time unsupervised.”

“And he’s got pictures of his kids on his desk, but there’s not a single one of her,” Meg added.

Under normal circumstances I’d have been the first to assume the worst—after all, I’d watched my father cheat on my mom, as if it was his job—but there was an honesty to Kyle, an inherent decency. He treated people well—he found work for Tom, an associate on the cusp of getting fired; he was on a first-name basis with the homeless guy who sat outside the building; he was just as nice to the janitor as he was to the managing partner.

He kept it all close to the vest, until the night I walked into his office and heard the tail end of an argument.

“It’s my weekend with them,” he said to someone on the other line. “That’s what the agreement is for.”

I began stepping back outside when he shook his head, waving me in as he hung up the phone.