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Why am I doing this again?!
“So you are of the opinion he death wouldn’t have anything to do with her work?” Martin asked.
“Not her work from this office,” I stressed again. “She may have been working with the higher-ups, I would have no idea what she was doing there.”
“Understood,” Reyes said. “And we will be talking to people in other parts of the firm, don’t worry. Just tell us what you know.”
“Vanishingly little, I’m afraid,” I said, mostly honestly. “Like I said, it’s not like we were close, I could tell you about the cases I was working on but they aren’t very interesting. Except…”
I let the word hang in the air. They were going to find out about it eventually, and it would seem weird if I didn’t bring it up. Because it was odd and unusual and I could just feign confusion about it.
“Except?” Martin prodded.
“This merger case I was working on. I thought it was finished, again, straightforward case, parties in agreement about the merger, and then I find out someone had updated a form but not told anyone, so while the documents they signed were perfectly valid and good, they weren’t the updated forms. And for some reason, I had assumed it was because the boss-bosses were on her about it, Jess was adamant that I get them to sign the new forms.” I paused, as if mulling it over.
“That’s a little odd, sure, but like you said, it wasn’t contested, so why do you think it’s important?” Martin asked.
“Well, had I been able to just go and get the signatures, it wouldn’t have been anything. But one of the principle signatories, Evan Burke, has essentially vanished.” I considered how much I was going to tell them, and decided I definitely had to mention my getting the documents from his lawyer. They would tell the police that much, and it would look terribly strange if I didn’t mention it. I could also admit to being sent after him, just that I hadn’t left yet. “We got in contact with his lawyer, who said he was out of the country and unreachable, though he did provide us with the correspondence he’d received from him. I assumed he was on a mission tracking down an antique – just because he’d sold his shop doesn’t mean he was done with hunting them down, naturally – but there seemed to be a lot of secrecy surrounding his trip?”
I paused again, as if I was just mulling it over for the first time. I wanted it to appear like I thought it was a little odd, but whatever, I just had a job to do and that was all that concerned me. Obviously, with questions coming up, I would be wondering about it more, right? They stayed silent, so I went on.
“I don’t know much… okay, anything, about antiques. Maybe because they are valuable, there is a lot of secrecy in hunting for them. All I know is that him being so out of touch was making my job a nightmare. I didn’t know where he was until he’d already left that place, and I was trying to convince Jess to just wait. He was scheduled to be back in six weeks, and in the realm of corporate law, that’s a blink. Nothing moves fast. But she wouldn’t have it, she wanted him tracked down. At the time, I assumed it was pressure from on high, but now, with… you know… I wonder?” I trailed off, because that honestly had just occurred to me. Despite all that I had speculated, all the back and forth with Steve, it had never occurred to me to question the validity of the thing that had started it all. Was there really new contract language? Had Mindy really known, or had she just played it off that ‘of course I’d known about it’? That would be like her, with her superior attitude and need to be right. I hadn’t really talked to anyone else but her and Jess, and I wouldn’t have talked to Mindy if she hadn’t happened to overhear me muttering to myself. Interesting…
“What was this merger?” Reyes asked, startling me out of my revere.
“Ah, Canin and Burke and Tanner and Birch.” I said.
“Didn’t Ms Johnson mention those names in the storeroom?” Martin cut in.
“Yes, she was asking about the file boxes. See, when I was tasked with going back over the case, I just had it all scanned it as I was searching for some documentation. We really should do that right off, but when we get busy, you know, things get put off…” I shrugged. “Anyway, Jess was so adamant about me fixing this, I had the time to devote to it and I wanted to make sure I did everything by the book, so as I was sorting through them I went ahead and scanned and organized them.”
“Did you find anything unusual?” Reyes asked, leaning forward, hopeful.
“No, not at all. Just receipts and legal forms, nothing I wasn’t expecting. Unless you count how much it costs to heat a drafty old building like that, that came as a bit of shock!”
They did not seem to appreciate my attempt at humor, and just looked pensive. Ask if there were any other cases with those firms, I thought as hard as I could, willing them to ask the question.
“Had you worked with those firms before?” Martin asked, and I suppressed a sigh of relief.
“I hadn’t, I don’t know if the firm had. A lot of our clients are repeat customers, so it wouldn’t surprise me. I could run a search on our files, if you’d like?”
“We’ll get to that, if we need to,” Reyes said. “Did Ms Kinsington have any contact with the clients in that or any of your other cases?”
“Oh, probably, but not a lot. Mostly over the phone, if she did, or maybe by email? She sent us to do most of the legwork, she spent most of her time reviewing the paperwork and making sure everything was in order,” I said, a little deflated that they hadn’t run with the previous client line of questioning. I really wanted them to find those pictures, though not quite enough to just hand them over. Yes, I’m a coward.
“So it was her job to review all the paperwork but she didn’t catch the fact that you were using an outdated contract before it was signed?” Reyes asked.
“I…” I was a bit speechless, because holy crap that was an obvious question, and one that I, in my misery at being so wrong and in trouble – again – I hadn’t considered. Nothing was ever Jess’s fault. She never did anything wrong, but it’s true, she had reviewed the contracts, though it would have been a pretty perfunctory review, and if she’d known about the update, why hadn’t she caught it then?
“You honestly never thought about that?” Martin asked, almost gently. I must have really looked both shocked and dismayed. Or something.
“I actually hadn’t, or if it had ever crossed my mind, I would have thought that it was such a run of the mill case, that she’d barely glanced at it? I mean, how many times do you want to read through a standard contract? And you have to understand… we’re conditioned to the fact that when things go wrong, it’s our fault. Even if we didn’t know something, it’s still our fault we didn’t ask about the thing we didn’t know about,” I said. I briefly wondered if this was going to come back and bite me, because the worse boss I made her out to be, the more suspicion would fall upon her underlings. “That’s just the way it is in law, there’s a lot of competition for jobs, especially what is a pretty cushy job like this one. We don’t deal with criminals or angry people, it’s very civil and straightforward and while there is pressure, it’s not usually the pressure of the unknown, it’s more trying to cram eighteen hours of work in to a ten hour workday. But lawyers are Type A personalities, mostly, and we thrive of pressure and stress.”
“But not the pressure of tracking down a client that had, for all intents and purposes, disappeared off the face of the earth?” Reyes asked.
“No, that was a new one,” I admitted. “But it was interesting, and I was going to get to travel. I don’t know if I still will, I don’t even know if I need to do anything with the contract at this point. You’ve brought up some good points, and I will need to wait for orders from the boss-bosses.”
“So you weren’t angry about it?” Martin asked. This was beginning to feel more like I was a suspect, and I didn’t like it one bit. It’s not like I could pull out Steve as my alibi, after all.
“Angry? No, not really. A little frustrated, a lot confused, but to be honest with you,” I winced inwardly at that phrase, did anyone who was actually being honest use it? “I was actually enjoying the mystery. It’s not very often in this line of work that you get to stretch your creative muscles. And by not very often I mean never. Everything is so regimented and precise, which is good in its own way. But it can also get monotonous. Granted, this may have been too much of a stretch on my creativity, because I still have zero ideas on how to track him down, but it was still something a little different.”
“I would think being set a nearly impossible task would be quite infuriating,” Martin said.
“And to top it off, it was questionable as to why, it had to feel like a waste of time,” Reyes said.
“Ha,” I said and shook my head. “Look, I’m just sitting about, waiting for retirement, and whatever it is they give me to do, it all pays the same. At least this is more interesting than sitting in on yet another deposition that draws out for three hours longer than it needs to because we know everyone is in agreement, just cut to the chase and wrap this up already! I don’t… I don’t have a stake in this. I’m not moving up the ladder, I just need to get my pension and go do something less… law-related. If I thought this was in danger of costing me that, yeah, maybe I would have been more anxious. But let me tell you, I’ve screwed up way, way, way worse than this before, and Jess didn’t even seem that upset about it. Because now that you’ve made me think about it – really think about it – she seemed way more concerned with finding Evan than she did anything about the contract. It’s weird, but I didn’t really question it before, because I’m just a good little employee, plodding along and doing what I’m told. I don’t want to make decisions or be in charge, just set me a task and let me on my way. In fact, unimportant, pointless tasks are awesome. You want twenty boxes of files scanned and organized? I’ll do it. You want minutes transcribed? Sure, why not? I actually enjoy busy work.”
“That’s… weird,” Martin said, not able to hold back his shock or disbelief.
“Of course you think it’s weird. Your job has purpose, and meaning, and what you do matters. I’m collecting a check and working to make money to support my hobbies and pay my rent.” I took a deep breath as I realized how bitter that sounded. “Wow, that came from… somewhere. I promise I’m not… unhappy with my job. But I also don’t understand why people can’t accept my indifference to it. It’s a job. It’s not that difficult. It pays the bills. End of.”
We sat there in an uncomfortable silence for a bit too long, and then Martin stood up.
“Well, thank you for your time, we’ll call you if we think of anything else. And if you think of anything you should have told us, no matter how minor you think it might be, please give me a call.”
He handed me his business card, and I left the room, not entirely sure how that interview went on the balance. Did I come off as a bit unhinged? Maybe. But I’d spoken the truth about my feelings about the job, except the part about not worrying about getting fired. That was a lie. Jess had been furious about… not the contract, I now realize, but the disappearance of Evan Burke. She hadn’t cared about me getting him to sign the papers, all her efforts and questions were focused on me finding him. It was a slight distinction, but it was very real. So I wasn’t so certain she’d told anyone much about her anger, her plan, or her frustration with me. Which would mean I was still a solid employee that had no prior major issues and no reason to want to kill my boss. Just an innocent bystander, tangentially dragged into the middle of something. And that’s exactly what I was, with the addition of a problematic demon.
Not that Steve was a problem, he was anything but! Having a demon at all was mildly problematic, though. I didn’t entirely trust him that there wasn’t an ulterior motive or that there weren’t going to be bigger consequences somewhere down the line, but for now I was enjoying my personal chef and movie buddy. And I refused to think much beyond that. I’d worry about that tomorrow, as Scarlett would say.
In the meantime, I did copy all of the documentation Evan’s lawyer had given me about his quest and got up to leave it with Rhonda to give to the Suits. I was okay with not talking to them again, though I wondered if they did find those pictures, if they would come back to me with more questions. Possibly. Probably. Not that I had any answers for them, I was still as mystified as I was when I started, and now slightly depressed that it looked like my trip to Hawaii was off. Though I did wonder about that contract, now that they’d brought it up.
“Rhonda,” I said, handing her the folder. “This is for the detectives, it’s some documentation Evan’s lawyer’s gave me.”
“Evan Burke?” She took the folder, looking confused. “What about? We’ll have to run it through legal before we give them anything, but I’ll hang on to it for now.”
“Jess had asked me to track him down, but he’d disappeared…” I trailed off as she looked at me blankly. “Because of the problem with the merger contract?”
“What problem?” She asked.
“The change in the language? She asked me to get new forms signed.”
“That contract has already been processed and recorded,” Rhonda said slowly. “It wasn’t going to be changed. There was nothing wrong with it.”
“Oh,” was all I could say. That rather confirmed my suspicions, but what I was going to do with that information, well, I didn’t know yet. “I… I can only tell you what she told me, she asked me to track him down. Maybe it was that there were additional forms? Maybe there was a different matter? I don’t know.”
Except I did know. She had been very clear, berating me about messing up, probably betting on the fact that I wouldn’t tell anyone. Which I hadn’t. Mindy had overheard, true, but how detailed had I been with her? I think I’d only said something about not having used an updated form, and she’d rolled her eyes and commented that it was odd I hadn’t, like everyone knew… about the updated notary page. That had been recently updated, and I had incorporated that into my contract. She didn’t know anything about language changes because there were none. She was talking about something that had happened the previous month, that yes, we all knew about. And I don’t think she knew what project I’d been talking about, anyway. Of course, the Suits knew all about it, now, so that cat was out of the bag, but maybe Mindy wouldn’t connect the dots, and I knew Rhonda wouldn’t say anything, though she was looking at me rather intently. She knew something was up, but she just nodded, took the folder, and turned to head back to her desk. I, too, went back to my desk to ponder these new revelations.
I missed having Steve to bounce things off of. Not just because it was helpful talking out loud to someone, anyone, to clarify your ideas, but because Steve had genuinely good insight and ideas. He was smarter than I was by a good deal, and I was a bit at loose ends trying to muddle through on my own. I might as well try to get some actual work done, I thought, because goodness knows the firm isn’t going to slow down one iota because a lawyer died. That would not be profitable.
The rest of my day was spent doing the mindless busy work I had sworn to the Suits I didn’t mind, and it was true. The repetition and comforting familiarity of the tasks was soothing and relaxing, and by the time I had finished the filing and scanning and filling in a few forms on some new cases that had popped up, it was almost time to leave for the day. And it was getting close to getting dark. Steve would be back, soon, and I couldn’t wait to tell him what I’d found out today about the whole mess. Maybe he could make more sense of it than I could. I just needed to stop at the grocery store on the way home, and decide what I wanted for dinner.
I'm going to be brutally honest, if I could have sent Steve tot he grocery store, I would. I'm not entirely sure why I have going to the grocery store as much as I do, but it's up there with putting gas in the car, unloading the dishwasher, and folding laundry. All things that need to be done, and aren't actually hard, but are annoying. And it has nothing to do with the money spent, as far as gas and groceries go, it's all about the time spent. Though it's weird how I don't mind boring and repetitive jobs when I'm getting paid at work. Maybe if someone paid me to fold my own laundry...
Total wordcount: 26,782
On/off target: -8,226
Why am I doing this again?!
“So you are of the opinion he death wouldn’t have anything to do with her work?” Martin asked.
“Not her work from this office,” I stressed again. “She may have been working with the higher-ups, I would have no idea what she was doing there.”
“Understood,” Reyes said. “And we will be talking to people in other parts of the firm, don’t worry. Just tell us what you know.”
“Vanishingly little, I’m afraid,” I said, mostly honestly. “Like I said, it’s not like we were close, I could tell you about the cases I was working on but they aren’t very interesting. Except…”
I let the word hang in the air. They were going to find out about it eventually, and it would seem weird if I didn’t bring it up. Because it was odd and unusual and I could just feign confusion about it.
“Except?” Martin prodded.
“This merger case I was working on. I thought it was finished, again, straightforward case, parties in agreement about the merger, and then I find out someone had updated a form but not told anyone, so while the documents they signed were perfectly valid and good, they weren’t the updated forms. And for some reason, I had assumed it was because the boss-bosses were on her about it, Jess was adamant that I get them to sign the new forms.” I paused, as if mulling it over.
“That’s a little odd, sure, but like you said, it wasn’t contested, so why do you think it’s important?” Martin asked.
“Well, had I been able to just go and get the signatures, it wouldn’t have been anything. But one of the principle signatories, Evan Burke, has essentially vanished.” I considered how much I was going to tell them, and decided I definitely had to mention my getting the documents from his lawyer. They would tell the police that much, and it would look terribly strange if I didn’t mention it. I could also admit to being sent after him, just that I hadn’t left yet. “We got in contact with his lawyer, who said he was out of the country and unreachable, though he did provide us with the correspondence he’d received from him. I assumed he was on a mission tracking down an antique – just because he’d sold his shop doesn’t mean he was done with hunting them down, naturally – but there seemed to be a lot of secrecy surrounding his trip?”
I paused again, as if I was just mulling it over for the first time. I wanted it to appear like I thought it was a little odd, but whatever, I just had a job to do and that was all that concerned me. Obviously, with questions coming up, I would be wondering about it more, right? They stayed silent, so I went on.
“I don’t know much… okay, anything, about antiques. Maybe because they are valuable, there is a lot of secrecy in hunting for them. All I know is that him being so out of touch was making my job a nightmare. I didn’t know where he was until he’d already left that place, and I was trying to convince Jess to just wait. He was scheduled to be back in six weeks, and in the realm of corporate law, that’s a blink. Nothing moves fast. But she wouldn’t have it, she wanted him tracked down. At the time, I assumed it was pressure from on high, but now, with… you know… I wonder?” I trailed off, because that honestly had just occurred to me. Despite all that I had speculated, all the back and forth with Steve, it had never occurred to me to question the validity of the thing that had started it all. Was there really new contract language? Had Mindy really known, or had she just played it off that ‘of course I’d known about it’? That would be like her, with her superior attitude and need to be right. I hadn’t really talked to anyone else but her and Jess, and I wouldn’t have talked to Mindy if she hadn’t happened to overhear me muttering to myself. Interesting…
“What was this merger?” Reyes asked, startling me out of my revere.
“Ah, Canin and Burke and Tanner and Birch.” I said.
“Didn’t Ms Johnson mention those names in the storeroom?” Martin cut in.
“Yes, she was asking about the file boxes. See, when I was tasked with going back over the case, I just had it all scanned it as I was searching for some documentation. We really should do that right off, but when we get busy, you know, things get put off…” I shrugged. “Anyway, Jess was so adamant about me fixing this, I had the time to devote to it and I wanted to make sure I did everything by the book, so as I was sorting through them I went ahead and scanned and organized them.”
“Did you find anything unusual?” Reyes asked, leaning forward, hopeful.
“No, not at all. Just receipts and legal forms, nothing I wasn’t expecting. Unless you count how much it costs to heat a drafty old building like that, that came as a bit of shock!”
They did not seem to appreciate my attempt at humor, and just looked pensive. Ask if there were any other cases with those firms, I thought as hard as I could, willing them to ask the question.
“Had you worked with those firms before?” Martin asked, and I suppressed a sigh of relief.
“I hadn’t, I don’t know if the firm had. A lot of our clients are repeat customers, so it wouldn’t surprise me. I could run a search on our files, if you’d like?”
“We’ll get to that, if we need to,” Reyes said. “Did Ms Kinsington have any contact with the clients in that or any of your other cases?”
“Oh, probably, but not a lot. Mostly over the phone, if she did, or maybe by email? She sent us to do most of the legwork, she spent most of her time reviewing the paperwork and making sure everything was in order,” I said, a little deflated that they hadn’t run with the previous client line of questioning. I really wanted them to find those pictures, though not quite enough to just hand them over. Yes, I’m a coward.
“So it was her job to review all the paperwork but she didn’t catch the fact that you were using an outdated contract before it was signed?” Reyes asked.
“I…” I was a bit speechless, because holy crap that was an obvious question, and one that I, in my misery at being so wrong and in trouble – again – I hadn’t considered. Nothing was ever Jess’s fault. She never did anything wrong, but it’s true, she had reviewed the contracts, though it would have been a pretty perfunctory review, and if she’d known about the update, why hadn’t she caught it then?
“You honestly never thought about that?” Martin asked, almost gently. I must have really looked both shocked and dismayed. Or something.
“I actually hadn’t, or if it had ever crossed my mind, I would have thought that it was such a run of the mill case, that she’d barely glanced at it? I mean, how many times do you want to read through a standard contract? And you have to understand… we’re conditioned to the fact that when things go wrong, it’s our fault. Even if we didn’t know something, it’s still our fault we didn’t ask about the thing we didn’t know about,” I said. I briefly wondered if this was going to come back and bite me, because the worse boss I made her out to be, the more suspicion would fall upon her underlings. “That’s just the way it is in law, there’s a lot of competition for jobs, especially what is a pretty cushy job like this one. We don’t deal with criminals or angry people, it’s very civil and straightforward and while there is pressure, it’s not usually the pressure of the unknown, it’s more trying to cram eighteen hours of work in to a ten hour workday. But lawyers are Type A personalities, mostly, and we thrive of pressure and stress.”
“But not the pressure of tracking down a client that had, for all intents and purposes, disappeared off the face of the earth?” Reyes asked.
“No, that was a new one,” I admitted. “But it was interesting, and I was going to get to travel. I don’t know if I still will, I don’t even know if I need to do anything with the contract at this point. You’ve brought up some good points, and I will need to wait for orders from the boss-bosses.”
“So you weren’t angry about it?” Martin asked. This was beginning to feel more like I was a suspect, and I didn’t like it one bit. It’s not like I could pull out Steve as my alibi, after all.
“Angry? No, not really. A little frustrated, a lot confused, but to be honest with you,” I winced inwardly at that phrase, did anyone who was actually being honest use it? “I was actually enjoying the mystery. It’s not very often in this line of work that you get to stretch your creative muscles. And by not very often I mean never. Everything is so regimented and precise, which is good in its own way. But it can also get monotonous. Granted, this may have been too much of a stretch on my creativity, because I still have zero ideas on how to track him down, but it was still something a little different.”
“I would think being set a nearly impossible task would be quite infuriating,” Martin said.
“And to top it off, it was questionable as to why, it had to feel like a waste of time,” Reyes said.
“Ha,” I said and shook my head. “Look, I’m just sitting about, waiting for retirement, and whatever it is they give me to do, it all pays the same. At least this is more interesting than sitting in on yet another deposition that draws out for three hours longer than it needs to because we know everyone is in agreement, just cut to the chase and wrap this up already! I don’t… I don’t have a stake in this. I’m not moving up the ladder, I just need to get my pension and go do something less… law-related. If I thought this was in danger of costing me that, yeah, maybe I would have been more anxious. But let me tell you, I’ve screwed up way, way, way worse than this before, and Jess didn’t even seem that upset about it. Because now that you’ve made me think about it – really think about it – she seemed way more concerned with finding Evan than she did anything about the contract. It’s weird, but I didn’t really question it before, because I’m just a good little employee, plodding along and doing what I’m told. I don’t want to make decisions or be in charge, just set me a task and let me on my way. In fact, unimportant, pointless tasks are awesome. You want twenty boxes of files scanned and organized? I’ll do it. You want minutes transcribed? Sure, why not? I actually enjoy busy work.”
“That’s… weird,” Martin said, not able to hold back his shock or disbelief.
“Of course you think it’s weird. Your job has purpose, and meaning, and what you do matters. I’m collecting a check and working to make money to support my hobbies and pay my rent.” I took a deep breath as I realized how bitter that sounded. “Wow, that came from… somewhere. I promise I’m not… unhappy with my job. But I also don’t understand why people can’t accept my indifference to it. It’s a job. It’s not that difficult. It pays the bills. End of.”
We sat there in an uncomfortable silence for a bit too long, and then Martin stood up.
“Well, thank you for your time, we’ll call you if we think of anything else. And if you think of anything you should have told us, no matter how minor you think it might be, please give me a call.”
He handed me his business card, and I left the room, not entirely sure how that interview went on the balance. Did I come off as a bit unhinged? Maybe. But I’d spoken the truth about my feelings about the job, except the part about not worrying about getting fired. That was a lie. Jess had been furious about… not the contract, I now realize, but the disappearance of Evan Burke. She hadn’t cared about me getting him to sign the papers, all her efforts and questions were focused on me finding him. It was a slight distinction, but it was very real. So I wasn’t so certain she’d told anyone much about her anger, her plan, or her frustration with me. Which would mean I was still a solid employee that had no prior major issues and no reason to want to kill my boss. Just an innocent bystander, tangentially dragged into the middle of something. And that’s exactly what I was, with the addition of a problematic demon.
Not that Steve was a problem, he was anything but! Having a demon at all was mildly problematic, though. I didn’t entirely trust him that there wasn’t an ulterior motive or that there weren’t going to be bigger consequences somewhere down the line, but for now I was enjoying my personal chef and movie buddy. And I refused to think much beyond that. I’d worry about that tomorrow, as Scarlett would say.
In the meantime, I did copy all of the documentation Evan’s lawyer had given me about his quest and got up to leave it with Rhonda to give to the Suits. I was okay with not talking to them again, though I wondered if they did find those pictures, if they would come back to me with more questions. Possibly. Probably. Not that I had any answers for them, I was still as mystified as I was when I started, and now slightly depressed that it looked like my trip to Hawaii was off. Though I did wonder about that contract, now that they’d brought it up.
“Rhonda,” I said, handing her the folder. “This is for the detectives, it’s some documentation Evan’s lawyer’s gave me.”
“Evan Burke?” She took the folder, looking confused. “What about? We’ll have to run it through legal before we give them anything, but I’ll hang on to it for now.”
“Jess had asked me to track him down, but he’d disappeared…” I trailed off as she looked at me blankly. “Because of the problem with the merger contract?”
“What problem?” She asked.
“The change in the language? She asked me to get new forms signed.”
“That contract has already been processed and recorded,” Rhonda said slowly. “It wasn’t going to be changed. There was nothing wrong with it.”
“Oh,” was all I could say. That rather confirmed my suspicions, but what I was going to do with that information, well, I didn’t know yet. “I… I can only tell you what she told me, she asked me to track him down. Maybe it was that there were additional forms? Maybe there was a different matter? I don’t know.”
Except I did know. She had been very clear, berating me about messing up, probably betting on the fact that I wouldn’t tell anyone. Which I hadn’t. Mindy had overheard, true, but how detailed had I been with her? I think I’d only said something about not having used an updated form, and she’d rolled her eyes and commented that it was odd I hadn’t, like everyone knew… about the updated notary page. That had been recently updated, and I had incorporated that into my contract. She didn’t know anything about language changes because there were none. She was talking about something that had happened the previous month, that yes, we all knew about. And I don’t think she knew what project I’d been talking about, anyway. Of course, the Suits knew all about it, now, so that cat was out of the bag, but maybe Mindy wouldn’t connect the dots, and I knew Rhonda wouldn’t say anything, though she was looking at me rather intently. She knew something was up, but she just nodded, took the folder, and turned to head back to her desk. I, too, went back to my desk to ponder these new revelations.
I missed having Steve to bounce things off of. Not just because it was helpful talking out loud to someone, anyone, to clarify your ideas, but because Steve had genuinely good insight and ideas. He was smarter than I was by a good deal, and I was a bit at loose ends trying to muddle through on my own. I might as well try to get some actual work done, I thought, because goodness knows the firm isn’t going to slow down one iota because a lawyer died. That would not be profitable.
The rest of my day was spent doing the mindless busy work I had sworn to the Suits I didn’t mind, and it was true. The repetition and comforting familiarity of the tasks was soothing and relaxing, and by the time I had finished the filing and scanning and filling in a few forms on some new cases that had popped up, it was almost time to leave for the day. And it was getting close to getting dark. Steve would be back, soon, and I couldn’t wait to tell him what I’d found out today about the whole mess. Maybe he could make more sense of it than I could. I just needed to stop at the grocery store on the way home, and decide what I wanted for dinner.
I'm going to be brutally honest, if I could have sent Steve tot he grocery store, I would. I'm not entirely sure why I have going to the grocery store as much as I do, but it's up there with putting gas in the car, unloading the dishwasher, and folding laundry. All things that need to be done, and aren't actually hard, but are annoying. And it has nothing to do with the money spent, as far as gas and groceries go, it's all about the time spent. Though it's weird how I don't mind boring and repetitive jobs when I'm getting paid at work. Maybe if someone paid me to fold my own laundry...
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