The Last Invitation (5)
The leader didn’t flinch. “The old system may seem draconian, but we all survived it. As it stands now, it is the best way to assess commitment, drive, and ability to handle our workload.”
She waited until the woman who had interrupted nodded. “Good. Then let’s open the discussion so we can move for a third vote. If the vote is again ‘no,’ we will not reconsider this person for membership again.”
Chapter Six
Jessa
Their small group went out to dinner at least once a month. Jessa prided herself on being practical and thought it was weird to hear grown-ups talk about having best friends, but hers was Faith Rabara. They’d met during freshman orientation at Georgetown almost twenty years ago, and their lives had circled around each other ever since.
Faith, from a big Filipino family that believed in frequent gatherings filled with laughter and unending plates of food. Jessa, raised in relative quiet by her dad in Ohio as he juggled extra shifts at the plant and nonstop requests by her maternal grandparents to see her as a way of staying connected to the daughter they lost when Jessa was born.
The third member of their little group joined in fourteen months ago. Tim Abner. Specifically, Timothy Aloysius Abner, grandson of a former congressman from Connecticut and Jessa’s live-in boyfriend. She wasn’t great at remembering dates or names, but she knew the exact date she met Tim because it was the day a one-night stand stretched into a weekend-long sex session and eventually a relationship. Jessa couldn’t figure out if that was romantic or not, so she pretended it was.
Tim was also an attorney, but almost everyone in DC seemed to be, so that wasn’t special. He practiced international business law, and a few sentences about his day were enough to put Jessa to sleep.
Tim arrived late to the bustling restaurant, as usual, taking off his suit jacket as he rounded the table and kissed Jessa. “What did I miss?”
Faith lowered her wineglass long enough to answer over the murmur of conversation in the open dining room. “The details of Jessa’s scary day in court.”
He slid into the chair next to Jessa. “I’m going to need something stronger than wine if we’re going to talk about couples fighting over lawn furniture or whatever it is this time.”
The waitress swung by then was off again, but she’d temporarily derailed the conversation, just as Jessa hoped. She’d be happy to talk about any subject except this one case.
Faith missed the silent woman-to-woman signal or something, because she chugged on. “You need to tell your law partners that—”
“I’m not going to make the jump from associate to partner if I whine.” There. Done. Ending the conversation there would make her evening less bumpy. The idea of engaging in endless rounds of arguments with Tim on this topic sounded exhausting. Jessa had had enough male wrangling for one day.
“He threatened to kill you,” Faith said, not letting the topic go.
“Wait.” Tim stopped in the middle of reaching for Jessa’s wineglass. “Rewind.”
Jessa shot Faith a quick thanks a lot glare before diving in. “Darren Bartholomew lost it outside of the courtroom. I bet tomorrow he calls and apologizes and is back to his nerdy self.”
Faith saluted them with her glass. “And you’ll accept his groveling because the rich always get a pass.”
The return of the waitress with more drinks cut off Tim’s response, but he had it loaded and ready for the second she left the table again. “Let’s not turn this into class warfare.”
Faith winked at him. “Says the boarding-school dude with the funky middle name.”
“I’ll have you know it’s a very revered name . . . or so my mom says,” he said in a voice loaded with sarcasm. “Hell, I didn’t pick it.” He laughed as he looked at Jessa. “But let’s stay on topic. The Bartholomews?”
Jessa hated talking about her work. She hadn’t picked family law as her specialty. She fell into it. Right out of law school, she’d worked for a small firm. No one wanted to turn clients away or refer them out, so she’d done a little bit of everything and had gotten into a courtroom, trying cases, long before she likely was ready to handle them.
A few divorce cases got her noticed by her current firm, Covington, Irving and Bach. They specialized in family matters, building up an impressive reputation among the wealthy and connected in the DC area. Being good at something she hated trapped her in a cycle of high salary and low happiness that she couldn’t seem to break out of for thirteen years and two firms. Since that was a pretty nice problem to have, she kept quiet about it.
Tim sighed. “Maybe—and just listen for a second before you get ticked off—maybe you should get out of this case.”
Faith froze. “Are you really worried about her safety?”
“He’s not,” Jessa said. He was worried about his job. His reputation. His partners getting ticked off. He never said any of it out loud, but he clearly weighed and assessed their respective careers and found his far more important and worthy of preservation than hers.
“What I’m hearing . . .” Faith took another sip of her drink. “Is that this is not the first time you two have had this conversation.”
Some people sitting in the third-wheel position might feel uncomfortable. Not Faith. She ran a charity called Safe Harbor Limited that helped women and children displaced by domestic violence find alternative living arrangements, so she listened to people’s darkest secrets and worst moments all day. Nothing shook her or lessened her sarcasm.