Complications

The elevator opened on the fourteenth floor and Vivienne Holloway stepped out looking like she belonged there.

She didn’t. Not yet. But she had been performing belonging since she was sixteen, standing in her mother’s kitchen handing Christine tissues while Christine cried beautiful, practiced tears about a marriage that had ended because Christine had needed it to end. Vivienne had stood there and nodded and made the right sounds, and somewhere between the first tissue and the fourth she had learned something useful.

You could feel the floor dropping out from under you and still look like you were standing on solid ground. You just had to decide which one mattered more.

She had been making that decision ever since.

The offices of Hargrove, Vance and Associates smelled like expensive coffee and old paper and the kind of ambition that had somewhere to put itself. Cold air from the vents. The faint chemical smell of new carpet under the old. Charcoal gray, thick enough to swallow sound. Somewhere a printer ran, steady and periodic, like a pulse.

Light came through floor-to-ceiling windows on the east wall and fell in long pale strips across the open associate area. Someone had taped a card to the window ledge at the far end. A birthday card, from the look of it, left there long enough to curl at the edges. No one had taken it down. It was the kind of office that had been designed to make you feel like your work mattered.

She caught her reflection in the glass as she crossed, a half-second of it. The left shoulder of her jacket sitting slightly off, the way it always went when she had been carrying her bag on her left side, the thing she fixed in lobby mirrors. She did not stop to fix it.

Three people were already waiting near reception. She read them the way she always read rooms, fast, systematic, eyes moving before her expression did.

The first one stood up the moment she walked in.

He was good-looking in an obvious way, tall with broad shoulders and the kind of smile that knew it was working. He crossed the room before she’d taken three steps and put out his hand like he was closing a deal.

“Tyler Marsh,” he said. “Columbia Law. You’re Holloway, right? They sent us the cohort bios.”