I decide to push my advantage. “What about the old cases I sent around? Do we think there’s anything there?”

“You mean the Mitchell case?” Flora speaks up. Brightly, of course.

“The Mitchells, Dales, Baums, and Allens were the primary plaintiffs,” Portland jumps in. He doesn’t miss the chance to get some Brownie points. I like him. “Apparently their daughters—teenagers, four of them—got really sick. Tremors. Vision disturbances. Episodes of fainting. They filed a civil suit when it began to spread—”

“Right. Then dropped it.” Joe tosses the stack of notes back on his desk. “It was a hoax. Just young girls trying to get rich in a corporate payout.” Then, without warning, he rounds on me. “Wasn’t it, Abby?”

Fucking Joe. He’s always litigating.

“That’s what they said.” I think of Kaycee trying and failing to pick up her pencil in art class. I think of her friends, twitching through the halls like insects. “There was a lot of attention on them. One of the girls skipped town afterward. The others withdrew their complaints. I’m originally from Barrens,” I explain into a room of blank stares, taking on the originally as if afterward I hopped around to, who knows, Paris and Rio and Santa Monica. “I was in school with the girls who got sick.”

“But there was an audit.” This is from Raj, our first-year associate. I suspect, from the distant courtesy with which he and Joe treat each other, that maybe they are screwing after hours. “Someone from the EPA came down and spent a month doing tests. Optimal passed. They’ve passed every review since then, too.”

“Still, it’s a pretty big coincidence, don’t you think?” I say, casually, as if the idea never occurred to me before.

“But it wasn’t a coincidence,” chimes perky Flora again. “Before Optimal moved to Barrens they were headquartered in Tennessee for a decade. At the time, they were called Associated Polymer. I guess that’s still the parent company. In the early 2000s a group of plaintiffs brought a case accusing Associated Polymer of illegal dumping. They paid out rather than fight the case, though they always denied wrongdoing.” This girl is really working for her A. You gotta love overachievers.

“If they didn’t do anything wrong, why would they settle?” Portland asks.

“Optimal’s come close to skirting the line a few different times over the past decade,” Joe says, riffling through a stack of papers as if checking his notes. It’s all for show. He has a photographic memory, or close to it. “Labor violations, tax audits, even a discrimination case. But nothing sticks. No one wants to press them too hard, not when they’re bringing in so much cash.”

“That’s small-town politics for you,” I say.

Flora picks up where she left off. “Well, that’s how the girls got the idea to shake them down in the first place. One of the girls—Misha Dole—said so.”

“Misha Dale,” I correct her.

“That wouldn’t help us now unless we can prove continuity,” Joe puts in. “If we want to do a deep dive on Optimal, we’ll need to convince someone there’s a reason we’re even looking. That means sworn testimonies and affidavits from people who are experiencing symptoms now. It also means ruling out other causes. I do not want to put my ass on the line only to find out we got some bedbugs and a crazy old man with a vendetta.”