The door swung open, and Ingram Barrett entered the room. I turned with a practiced smile. “Mr. Barrett.” I held out my hand. “It’s a pleasure.”

He was more attractive in person than in his photo. Power did that for a man. He wore a black suit and black shirt with no tie. He must have retired all his pin-striped suits and repp ties when he came to work for a fashion company. He shook my hand with a broad smile. “Please. Call me Barry. Everyone does.” He waved me to sit as he took the chair at the head of the table. “I have to apologize for not getting back to you sooner. We had some personnel shifts recently, and your résumé got lost in the shuffle.”

Personnel shift. A corporate euphemism for getting shitcanned. That might explain the departed Seth Salway.

“It wasn’t until I happened to run into Joel Edders at a function last week that it came back to me.” He slapped his forehead to show what a dunce he was.

Joel Edders was one of my supervising partners at Jackson Rieders, the one who gave me the highest marks he ever gave any associate, or so he told me. He was the only one to drop by my office on that other December 19. I’d been given an hour to clean out my desk while a security guard hovered nearby to prevent theft or sabotage. As recently as that morning I’d been entrusted with our clients’ million-dollar secrets; with the stroke of a pen, I was recast as a common thief.

Joel came by to tell me why. AT&T had yanked their business, he told me dolefully, a client that accounted for ten percent of our billings. Unless the firm made some drastic cuts, the partners might face reductions in their draws. They already had permanent offers out to ten of last year’s summer associates; they’d get some serious bad press if they tried to revoke them. So it was the current associates they had to cut, and third-year was the sweet spot.

As for why me, with my top marks and twenty-five hundred hours billed? Well, they couldn’t lay off Matt or Jeremy, whose fathers sat on the boards of two of their biggest clients. Or Justin, with a baby on the way; they weren’t monsters, for God’s sake. And if they laid off any of their diversity hires, at least three other clients would yank their business for failure to meet their requisite quotas. You, my dear, Joel confided, his hands spread helplessly, are a victim of affirmative action. I never knew if that was the real reason or if Joel was simply a racist. Maybe both were true. Keep in touch, he said, but months later, when I finally forced myself to make the call, he didn’t take it.

“Joel,” I said warmly to Barrett now.

“He tells me you did some work on that derivative suit in Rand.”

“Some?” I smiled. “I wrote the winning brief that got the case dismissed.”