“You might not.” He was quiet for a long while. Then he said, “Well, you might start to notice the same person in different locations. Or cars that seem to be lurking in your neighborhood.”
“If they’re any good, I suspect I wouldn’t see any trace of them, right?”
“Unless they want you to know they’re there.”
“Huh.”
“Can you summon Matías and the other lawyers in on some pretext?”
“I suppose I could. But why?”
“The more you interact with Matías, the better, from my standpoint. The more opportunities for me to follow him, trace him.”
“What happens when you do? If you do?”
“Then we’ll have some decisions to make.”
“All right. Let me ask you something, just putting it right out there. Do you think they’ll release the tape, make it public? Could that really happen?”
He shrugged, scowled. “Look, you take every precaution to prevent disaster. Knowing you may fail.”
“Dark,” she said.
“But what do I know?” he said with a hollow laugh.
15
Saturday night was the big St. Jude’s fundraiser, which everyone in the Boston political world attended, a black-tie benefit at the Copley Plaza Hotel. Duncan didn’t do black tie; he wore his black suit with a black necktie — he wore the same thing to funerals — and considered that a major concession to the powers that be. Because he’d gained a little weight in the last couple of years, he wasn’t able to button the suit jacket.
Neither Juliana nor Duncan especially liked black-tie affairs, but Duncan particularly disliked them. She wondered if it was because most of the time, they were invited because she was Judge Brody, and maybe he didn’t enjoy being Mr. Judge Brody instead of Duncan Esposito. But he’d never admit it.
And who could blame him for feeling that way? In his world, at the law school, he was the great Professor Esposito. Funky Dunc. The editor of a widely used anthology on critical legal studies. He had groupies.
She remembered one in particular.
Three years ago he started leaving carbs on his plate, working out regularly, paring his mini-paunch. He took the stairs two at a time. He started wearing cologne. He was looking especially good, and she told him so.
Then one day his phone made a text-message alert sound when he was out of the room, having left his phone on the hall table next to hers. She wasn’t sure whose phone had just pinged. She picked up her own, saw nothing, picked up Duncan’s, and saw a message from a “Jenna” that contained an emoticon of a blushing smiley face.
She called Duncan’s name and handed him his phone. Her facial expression told him she’d seen something.
He noticed and glanced at his phone, and his face went red.
“Is there something you wanted to talk to me about?” she asked.
To Duncan’s credit, he said, “Yeah.”
His voice sounded faraway. She became hyperaware of her surroundings, of the dust motes floating in the sunbeam that transected the hallway, the ticking of the house settling, the distant throaty snarl of a snowblower. She thought, This moment is the divider between before and after.
“Look,” he said, “I guess this girl has a crush on me. One of those ‘hot for teacher’ things, God help us. I mean, what am I supposed to do? I can’t kick her out of class.” He sounded casual yet at the same time slightly... rehearsed.
And there was something evasive about the way he was acting. He folded his legs in a way he rarely did, and he kept avoiding her eyes.
So that was his story — a law student named Jenna had fallen in love with him, and there was nothing to be done about it.
Part of her wanted to be content with that. Because she knew that sometimes foraging around for the marital truth was sort of like thrusting your hand down a jammed garbage disposal to retrieve a paring knife. Maybe you grasp it by the handle. Maybe by the blade. And maybe the damned thing starts grinding again.
But she couldn’t leave it alone.
She ferreted out the girl’s name, went through her Facebook and Instagram feeds. She asked Duncan to show her the text-message thread before the one with the blushing-smiley-face emoticon. She knew that couldn’t have been the first time they’d exchanged texts.
He took out his phone and found the one from Jenna and handed the phone to her. She looked, saw that there were no texts before blushing smiley face, and she suddenly felt cold. He’d deleted all the earlier ones.
Which meant that he had a reason to do so.
A few days later she brought it up again. He admitted that maybe he hadn’t totally discouraged Jenna.
“So what are we talking?” she said. “Anthony Weiner — style crotch shots?”
“No, God no, nothing like that.”
“Just friendly flirtation, then?”
He closed his eyes momentarily, looked down for a long time, then looked up. “I’m so sorry. But nothing happened. That’s the truth. Nothing happened.”
Nothing happened.
Maybe.
Yet she knew that Duncan had been transforming himself for a reason. He was thinking about this girl, about the possibility of an affair, all the time. Nothing happened. That was one truth. Another was: everything happened.
Soon the conversation turned to trust. Duncan said, “If you can’t trust me, our marriage has problems a lot more serious than a student with a crush on me. I’m telling you that nothing happened, and that’s the goddamned truth, and if you think I’m lying to your face right now, I’d like to know. Because I’d like to know how things really are between us.”
He was aiming the big guns at her now, and she backed down. “Okay,” she said.
He came close and stroked her hair. He was close enough that his beard tickled her face. “You know I love you, right?” he said. “You know you’re the most important thing in my life, right?”
“I know,” she said, because she didn’t know what else to say.
That had been three years ago.
At the gala, Juliana knew she looked good. She was wearing her Michael Kors suit. She’d just gotten a manicure. She wore her hair up in a chignon. She and Duncan entered the ballroom arm in arm, and she searched the crowd for a familiar face.
There were plenty of familiar faces. The owner of the New England Patriots was talking to the CEO of Fidelity Investments. The CEO of Liberty Mutual Insurance was picking shrimp from a large ice sculpture. A guy she’d worked with years ago at the US Attorney’s office was chatting up someone she didn’t recognize. At a distance she spied Martha Connolly, talking with the governor.
She found herself next to Noah Miller, a senior partner at a big Boston law firm she knew only casually. A real power lawyer. Miller was a portly, rumpled man in his mid-fifties with curly black hair ringing a large bald spot and penetrating brown eyes behind rimless glasses. He was holding a rocks glass of bourbon, most of it gone.
“How’s it going, Noah?”
“Can’t complain, and no one listens anyway. So what’s on your docket these days?”
She sighed theatrically. “About a thousand cases.”
“I heard you have a sex-harassment suit against the CEO of that start-up Wheelz.”
“Yup.”
“You haven’t granted summary judgment already?” A standard motion, made regularly but seldom granted. She had the power, theoretically, to dismiss the case. Shut it down. Wheelz’s lawyers had filed a motion asking for summary judgment at the start, and she’d denied it quickly. Rachel Meyers had a real case and had the right to a trial.
“Nope,” she said.