She stared at the ballot like it was a death warrant and then said, almost in a whisper: “His wife has breast cancer.”
“Dan’s?”
“No. John Walker’s wife. His secretary said it’s in her lymph nodes.”
“You’re kidding? Jesus, she’s young.”
Scott’s mother had been young, too, only forty-three, when the same cancer had killed her. Scott had watched helplessly as she lost her breasts, her hair, and her life. He now thought of John’s wife and of John, who would soon be standing on the street outside this building, coat and career in hand, cursing his partners for abandoning him and God for abandoning his wife, just as Scott had cursed God as the cancer consumed his mother’s body ounce by ounce until she felt like a feather pillow when he lifted her from the bed and carried her to the bathroom.
“Damn.”
He could do no more for John’s wife than he could for his mother, and no more for John than all the other lawyers Dan Ford had fired without warning…but still. Scott stared at himself in the mirrored wall until the elevator eased to a smooth stop and the doors opened on the sixty-ninth floor. The elevator chime snapped him out of his thoughts like a referee’s whistle after an injury time-out. He stepped out. The elevator doors closed behind him, and he entered the domain of Dibrell Property Company, the firm’s landlord and his most important client, accounting for over ninety percent of the legal fees he generated each year, fees that had bought everything Scott Fenney owned in life, from the bed he slept in to the shoes on his feet.