When I open my eyes, I let myself feel before I think. A big black line goes through Yesterly and Havings. Another goes through school and then hermit life. I shove the book away and pace to the pond’s edge. Making those lines filled me with so much energy, I need to burn some off. I don’t need to go back to Yesterly and Havings. Richard and Brittany can be out of my life completely.
I don’t owe them anything, and I don’t owe Dad my career.
This begs the question of who I am if I’m not a lawyer, but this isn’t a dystopian future where citizens need to tattoo their profession on their foreheads. It can be an ongoing question for future Ari. Back at the table, I pick up my notebook, idly doodling a series of dashes as I consider my options. They look like little negatives, all the things I’m excising from my life. Removing. Deleting. I very deliberately add a thin vertical line to the center of each dash. I don’t have to only remove. I can add and grow.
I can make those negatives positives.
I want to start my life for real, and it’s fine if I figure it out as I go.
Forty-Seven
“This is a new look for you.” Ines waves an approving hand. My hair is loose, and I’m in a Kelly-green dress with a short skirt that would have raised every eyebrow at Yesterly and Havings.
“I quit my job.” The conversation with Richard had been brief and exhilarating. He hadn’t even tried to get me to stay. I screamed with relief the second the call ended, possibly even while disconnecting, before dancing a little jig around the kitchen, middle fingers raised to the phone in a final salute.
“Good, you were wasted there,” she says. “What will you do?”
I smooth the front of my dress. “I have an idea.”
She waits, and it’s now or never. “I can’t ask this officially because I don’t want be seen stealing a client, but I want to join Luxe as your part-time in-house counsel.” I’d realized by the pond was that it wasn’t necessarily law I hated. In fact, I enjoyed a lot of the actual work. The culture was the problem.
Ines temples her hands as Yuko stops typing to eavesdrop. “Part-time. The rest of the time?”
“I want to create tours for you, like I did for Alex. I know they can be successful.”
There’s a long silence. “You’ve thought this through, Ari?”
“Yes. I have five proposals ready, plus an overview of the industryand what gaps they fill.” The plan came to me in the middle of the night, and I initially pushed it aside as completely unworkable. I also couldn’t stop writing down ideas. Hana, who had kept watch on me since she’d come home from Korea, was the one to point out I lost nothing by trying.
So here I am, trying.
Ines smiles, lips a crimson slash against her dark skin. “Then it’s a good thing I called Richard Havings yesterday to tell him the new lawyer he’d given me was the most vacuous human I’d ever met and Yesterly and Havings was fired unless I had you back.”
“What did he say?”
She adjusts her skirt. “He didn’t give me what I wanted, which is you. I told him I was leaving.”
Elation fills me. “He wouldn’t like that.”
Ines raises an eyebrow. “I don’t care.”
“There was some controversy when I left.” I want no secrets. “I assure you it wasn’t about my work.”
Yuko leans over. “Are you referring to Newlight’s statement that you stalked Min of StarLune on two continents?”
“Ah, yes.” I glare at her. “Thanks for describing it so concisely to Ines.”
She gives me a wicked grin. “Revenge for not letting me get a peek while he was in Toronto. I don’t think you’re a stalker, by the way. Newlight is full of assholes, everyone knows that, and then there were the watches.”
“The what?”
“You were wearing matching Cartiers, and I know for a fact, because Ines told me, that you got yours as a gift and not as a sasaeng move.”
I blink. “That’s observant.”
“It was all over my social media. The matching watches, not the gift part. Only I knew that. Plus, that photo of the two of you was…wow.” Here she holds her hands to her chest. “No one’s ever looked at me like that. Like you were his world.”
Yeah, he did, at that moment. I don’t want to think about it.