Disclosure

"I’ll kill you!" she said. "I’ll fucking kill you."

"That’s enough, Meredith," he said.

"The hell." She threw a small paper bag at him. It thunked against the glass and dropped to the floor. A box of condoms fell out.

"I’m going home." He moved toward the door.

"That’s right," she said. "You go home to your wife and your little fucking family."

Alarms went off in his head. He hesitated for a moment.

"Oh yes," she said, seeing him pause. "I know all about you, you asshole. Your wife isn’t fucking you, so you come in here and lead me on, you set me up and then you walk out on me, you hostile violent fucking asshole. You think you can treat women this way? You asshole."

He reached for the doorknob.

"You walk out on me, you’re dead!"

He looked back and saw her leaning unsteadily on the desk, and he thought, She’s drunk.

"Good night, Meredith," he said. He twisted the knob, then remembered that the door had been locked. He unlocked the door and walked out, without looking back.

In the outer room, a cleaning woman was emptying trash baskets from the assistants’ desks.

"I’ll fucking kill you for this!" Meredith called after him.

The cleaning woman heard it, and stared at Sanders. He looked away from her, and walked straight to the elevator. He pushed the button. A moment later, he decided to take the stairs.

Sanders stared at the setting sun from the deck of the ferry going back to Winslow. The evening was calm, with almost no breeze; the surface of the water was dark and still. He looked back at the lights of the city and tried to assess what had happened.

From the ferry, he could see the upper floors of the DigiCom buildings, rising behind the horizontal gray concrete of the viaduct that ran along the water’s edge. He tried to pick out Meredith’s office window, but he was already too far away.

Out here on the water, heading home to his family, slipping back into his familiar daily routine, the events of the previous hour had already begun to take on an unreal quality. He found it hard to believe that it had happened. He reviewed the events in his mind, trying to see just where he had gone wrong. He felt certain that it was all his fault, that he had misled Meredith in some important way. Otherwise, she would never have come on to him. The whole episode was an embarrassment for him, and probably for her, too. He felt guilty and miserable-and deeply uneasy about the future. What would happen now? What would she do?

He couldn’t even guess. He realized then that he didn’t really know her at all. They had once been lovers, but that was a long time ago. Now she was a new person, with new responsibilities. She was a stranger to him.

Chapter 7

Although the evening was mild, he felt chilled. He went back inside the ferry. He sat in a booth and took out his phone to call Susan. He pushed the buttons, but the light didn’t come on. The battery was dead. For a moment he was confused; the battery should last all day. But it was dead.

The perfect end to his day.

Feeling the throb of the ferry engines, he stood in the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. His hair was messed; there was a faint smear of lipstick on his lips, and another on his neck; two buttons of his shirt were missing, and his clothes were rumpled. He looked as if he had just gotten laid. He turned his head to see his ear. A tiny bruise marked where she had bitten him. He unbuttoned the shirt and looked at the deep red scratches running in parallel rows down his chest.

Christ.

How was he going to keep Susan from seeing this?

He dampened paper towels and scrubbed away the lipstick. He patted down his hair, and buttoned his sport coat, hiding most of his shirt. Then he went back outside, sat down at a booth by the window, and stared into space.

"Hey, Tom."

He looked up and saw John Perry, his neighbor on Bainbridge. Perry was a lawyer with Marlin, Howard, one of the oldest firms in Seattle. He was one of those irrepressibly enthusiastic people, and Sanders didn’t much feel like talking to him. But Perry slipped into the seat opposite him.

"How’s it going?" Perry asked cheerfully.

"Pretty good," Sanders said.

"I had a great day."

"Glad to hear it."

`Just great," Perry said. "We tried a case, and I tell you, we kicked ass.

"Great," Sanders said. He stared fixedly out the window, hoping Perry would take the hint and go away.

Perry didn’t. "Yeah, and it was a damned tough case, too. Uphill all the way for us," he said. "Title VII, Federal Court. Client’s a woman who worked at MicroTech, claimed she wasn’t promoted because she was a female. Not a very strong case, to tell the truth. Because she drank, and so on. There were problems. But we have a gal in our firm, Louise Fernandez, a Hispanic gal, and she is just lethal on these discrimination cases. Lethal. Got the jury to award our client nearly half a million. That Fernandez can work the case law like nothing you’ve ever seen. She’s won fourteen of her last sixteen cases. She acts so sweet and demure, and inside, she’s just ice. I tell you, sometimes women scare the hell out of me."

Sanders said nothing.

He came home to a silent house, the kids already asleep. Susan always put the kids to bed early. He went upstairs. His wife was sitting up in bed, reading, with legal files and papers scattered across the bedcovers. When she saw him, she got out of bed and came over to hug him. Involuntarily, his body tensed.

"I’m really sorry, Tom," she said. "I’m sorry about this morning. And I’m sorry about what happened at work." She turned her face up and kissed him lightly on the lips. Awkwardly, he turned away. He was afraid she would smell Meredith’s perfume, or