down at his desk. “Look, Iz, I’ve got to tell you something. Elliot came down and got the Casey file this morning. Said he would finish the Motion to Dismiss.”
“Great. I’ve been asking him to help me for weeks.”
Elliot Nuster was an associate assigned to me. He had a stick-up-his-butt personality, but who could blame him when he also had to work with Tanner. Since Elliot was a year ahead of me, I often felt awkward giving him work, always having to ask nicely, and usually over and over again. But I simply couldn’t handle all the Pickett work myself. Luckily, many of the projects or cases that came in the door from Pickett could be farmed out to the specialty groups—our intellectual-property people or the tax department—but the rest was mine and it was a struggle to keep on top of it, especially when I had to beg my associate to help.
“Yeah, it sounds good,” Q said. “But it’s weird, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“He never offers to help.”
“No lawyer ever offers to help, but if Elliot heard what happened, he’s probably just chipping in, right?”
“Probably.”
Q and I locked eyes.
“What are you going to do now?” he asked.
I looked at my watch, a Baume & Mercier given to me by Forester. The image of his covered form on the hospital bed made tears tug at the insides of my eyes. Then I thought of something equally unpleasant. “I have to call Sam’s mom.”
As I spoke the words to Lynette, Sam’s mother—gone since yesterday, no sign of him, looks like he took Forester’s shares from the safe—the sky outside my office window grew dark. Rain swooped into the area, bruising the sky with patches of deep gray.
“I don’t understand.” Lynnette said. “What?” Her voice caught. I could tell she was trying not to cry, struggling for an answer. Just like me.
I pressed the phone to my ear, giving her any details I knew, which weren’t many.
“This isn’t right,” Lynette said. “I’m his mother. I brought that boy into the world, and I raised him. He is not a thief. There has to be a reason.”
Silently, I looked out at the rain. I nodded. But what that reason was, I couldn’t imagine.
When I was off the phone with Sam’s mom, I called every other friend of Sam’s I had a phone number for. Trying not to alarm anyone, I asked simply if they’d seen him yesterday. The answer was always no.
I looked at my watch. I called Mark Carrington to see if he’d learned anything new, but his assistant told me, in a frosty voice, that he was in meetings.
Panic started to rise in me, as much from futility as fear. Sam—disappeared. Forester—dead.
But Forester’s company was still here. Which meant Forester needed me.
I picked up a contract I needed to work on—Jane Augustine’s new one, but the words swam in front of me, like a bunch of tiny black fish in a white sea.
A memory crept into my mind of another day when I couldn’t concentrate on work. A year ago, the day Sam and I got engaged.
It was the week after Thanksgiving, and we were each in our respective offices, ostensibly working but at the same time sending a bevy of flirty instant messages back and forth. Outside, the temperature had hit a bizarre sixty degrees, making everyone in the office gaze wistfully out the window.
I had just finished a letter that would be sent to the hundreds of employees of Pickett Enterprises, explaining the new paternity-leave policy, an easy task because it gave new dads a paid week off work. I called out to Q that I was e-mailing it to him, and I hit Send. But when I tried to move on to something new, I had a hard time focusing.
A message from Sam popped up on my computer with a pleasing ding. Hey Red Hot, it said, Want to play hooky and pretend we’re rock stars?
I wrote back, It’s 1:00 on a Wednesday.
Exactly. Let’s pretend we’re rock stars and we’re just waking up from a gig last night. We’ll get a hotel room and order food and champagne and drink it in bed.
I flipped open my calendar. No meetings scheduled that afternoon. Nothing to do, except attack the work that had been piling up, that was always piling up. I got back on the computer. You serious?
There was no message for three or four minutes. I opened a proposed contract for the renewal of a talk show Forester’s company produced.
The computer dinged. James Hotel. Meet me in the lobby in thirty minutes.
That was something I loved about Sam—his ability to cut loose. He worked hard, and he didn’t fear responsibility even a little. But he could also toss it aside and have a hedonistic amount of fun.
An hour and a half later, we were rock stars.
In the center of the suite, a huge room-service cart was piled with a strange mix of every single thing that had struck our fancy—popcorn, filet mignon, lobster salad, cheeses, champagne, beer and a huge ice-cream sundae that was chilling on a bed of ice under a silver cover.
Sam had brought CDs from his office, and we blared the tunes.
“C’mere,” Sam growled at me at one point. He was standing at the side of the bed where I was sprawled in a haze of food and sex and music. He tugged me into a standing position and led me to the room-service cart. “We still have the ice-cream sundae, and I want to lick it off your collarbone.”
“I won’t say no to that.”
Sam held my hand in his warm grasp and with the other, lifted the silver cover off the sundae.
“Yum.” I pointed at the mounds of whip cream. “I can think of something better we can do with that.”
I began to kiss his neck. I loved the way he tasted right then—a little salty, a little sweet, a little something darker.
“Can you think of something we can do with this?”
I looked. Sam was pointing at the top of the sundae. I blinked. Looked closer. Something was imbedded in the cream, and it was sparkling. I leaned forward, peered harder. It looked, oddly, like the art deco ring we’d seen in a window of a jewelry store.
I glanced at Sam, whose cute face was simply beaming. He nodded.
“Is that …?”
He nodded again. He took the sparkle from the top of the sundae and wiped it off with the edge of his robe. “Baby,” he said, “you are a star. You’re my star. I want you shining in my life forever.”
Tears, like a cool, soothing rain, ran down my hot face. At the same time, I threw back my head and laughed. I had debated before about whether I wanted to get married. Sam and I had discussed the issue from every angle and we’d decided, in reasonable fashion, that we did want to get married eventually. But now, with Sam sinking to his knees, logic and reason were nowhere in the room.
