“Bottom line. You want to talk bottom line? Fine. Here’s a bottom line for you, Bradford. You owe me about three thousand dollars for services rendered in my professional capacity. Would you care to cough that up before you pack your toothbrush, or should I bill the firm?”

She would never see a dime of it, not that she cared so much about the money. It was the idea that burned her cookies. She felt used. He had taken advantage of their relationship while he had been struggling to get a toehold at the firm. I have to share a secretary, Marilee. Please, can’t you just type this up for me. Just this once (twice, three times, eighty-five times). Don’t you want me to look good? Couldn’t you just help out a little with those transcripts? It would make such a good impression if I could have this done… He had treated her as if she were his personal, free-of-charge legal secretary. Now that he was moving up in the world, he wouldn’t have to save pennies by literally screwing a court reporter out of her fees.

She felt like a fool. How she had ever managed to fall for a lawyer in the first place was beyond her. No. That was a lie. In her heart she knew what she had been doing with the upwardly mobile Bradford Enright, and it was so Freudian, it was depressing. Her family had approved of him. They may have seen her career as a court reporter as being a giant step down from their expectations for her, but Brad had made a nice consolation prize. They could look at him and still hold out some hope that she would settle into the life of pleasant snobbery to which they were all accustomed.

What a hypocrite she was. In her heart she knew she’d never really loved Brad. He was right: they didn’t want any of the same things-including each other. She had gone through the motions, pretended passion, lied to him and to herself time and again by saying she was happy, when the truth was a partner at Hawkins and Briggs didn’t come close to making the list of things she wanted out of life. The time had come to admit that.