Donny turned. The door opened, and a young blond woman stepped in.

“Hey, baby,” said Slider.

The woman was looking at Donny, her poker face not quite containing her surprise.

It took a minute for Donny to realize who she was. The last time he had seen her, she was still in school.

“Hello, Heather,” he said. “How’s your dad?”

6

Donny had been around Heather a few times over the years. The one he remembered best was a dinner party Donny and his then-girlfriend Joyce had attended at the home of Heather’s parents, Donny’s old colleague Lou and his wife, Helen.

On the golf course and at the bar, they used to only half-jokingly ask Lou why in the hell he was still billing 2,300 hours a year when he was married to one of the richest women in Texas. His replies were always half-true, you could tell.

She makes me.

I love what I do.

I need to get out of the house.

I love the view from my office.

I need to model a good work ethic for my daughter.

Only their closest friends knew that Heather had an older brother, a boy whose name no one said anymore, because he had died as a toddler. It happened when Lou and Helen were out entertaining a client, and the kid was home with the nanny. The boy drowned in the pool. There was even some suspicion that it was not an accident, that the eccentric English nanny was crazier than the background check had revealed. Lou and Helen decided to channel their grief into the joy of a new kid, and making sure nothing bad ever happened to her.

Some kids are born with a silver spoon. Heather was born with a trust in her name worth more than $10 million. And when her mother’s life was taken, she became a billionaire, if you counted all of the family holdings that traced back to her through the labyrinth of shell companies the corporate lawyers hid it in. The money that went into her trust upon the probate of her mother’s estate was old money, money that had been hard-coded before World War II by different lawyers—ones with white shirts under three-piece, three-button suits and wire-framed glasses—to never leave the lineal descendants of the man who first earned it. Even Lou couldn’t touch it.

Now we know why you still practice law when you could be playing tennis all day, they teased Lou, when he first told them that he was the only dude they knew who had to sign a prenup.