Into A Better Shape

Robin Wright Full Manuscript: 66,000 words

Into A Better Shape

Adult

Romantic suspense

Epigraph:

“"But you said to me," returned Estella, very earnestly, 'God bless you, God forgive you!' And if you could say that to me then, you will not hesitate to say that to me now - now, when suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape. Be as considerate and good to me as you were, and tell me we are friends."

"We are friends," said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench.

"And will continue friends apart," said Estella.

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”

Charles Dickens, ‘Great Expectations’, as revised after discussion with Wilkie Collins

Prologue

Daniel had met Barbara, really, to talk about the dog, Rosie. As lunches with his wife went, it could not have been less pleasant. He told her what the vet had said, and the advice on what they could or should do about it. Barbara had listened for five minutes, before lobbing her hand grenade into his proverbial underpants with no warning.

“I’m going to live with Theresa, Daniel.” She had looked at him with those big, beautiful brown eyes that he had always adored, eyes now full of shame and defiance in equal measure. She had expected him to shout at her, to plead, to beg – but she had not allowed for the total shock.

Daniel was a clever man. He had trained as a lawyer, and had kept his hand as the firm needed him - his licenses up to date, his instincts sharper than anyone who saw the monthly reports would guess. All that cleverness, all those street smarts, all that expertise dealing with people throwing things into legal agreements from left field had deserted him entirely when his own world had been shattered. It was too much to expect him to respond in an intelligent way to the double whammy, that his wife wanted to leave him, for a woman five years her senior. Two years his senior, for that matter. Theresa had been her counsellor, for two years. Therapist, rather, he remembered, now, after the death of their daughter, Ruby, from leukemia.

So now, a week later, he was sitting in a coffee shop on Park Avenue, New York City, on a hot July morning, wondering what the hell he was going to do with his life. Barbara had had a plan. She had known it was coming, and she had been able to make that plan. They had met again two days later, and she had set out her plan. She would take the apartment on Madison, the dogs, Rosie and Bess, half the cash in their savings accounts and the house in Vermont. She would take half his salary in alimony, and…

That was as far as her plan had got. Barbara worked as a junior partner in a small law firm in Manhattan. She didn’t quite earn as much as he did, but it was fairly close. Rosie and Bess were his pride and joy. Hers was her art collection. Daniel had stopped her outline, with a flat ‘No, Barbara.’

The conversation had been quite short, after that.

“What do you mean, no?” she had asked, seeing his implacability writ large on his unsmiling face.

“You have said you want to leave. You have said you want to move in permanently with Theresa. Well, I will not stop you – there would be no point, my love. I adore you, but if you don’t adore me because you now love Theresa, there’s not much I can do about it. Yes, you can have half whatever is in our savings accounts, and of course all your artwork, but that is it. There will be no property, no alimony, and absolutely, positively no dogs.”

She had shouted at him, called him all the names under the sun. She had pleaded with him after that. She needed money, to make her new life, she said. She had promised Theresa that she would bring the dogs, apparently. She had begged him to see things from her point of view.

It had not changed a thing. She had shattered his life, and he could not see any reason why she should also be allowed to shatter his chances of recovering from that.

He had met with her lawyer the following morning, and agreed to transfer half the value of their savings to Barbara’s lawyer. Barbara could collect the artwork, and all her belongings, but she was not entitled to any property, because the house in Vermont had been his parent’s house. The apartment he had bought himself, when she had made it a condition of their engagement. She was not entitled to any alimony, because she had never depended on him for financial support. And the dogs were his, by purchase and by rescue, and by preference – their preference, not just his. In return, he would allow the divorce to go through uncontested, as ‘irretrievable breakdown for six months’ or whatever they needed to call it, instead of his keeping all the savings and calling it out for what it was – adultery by her. He had wished her well, via her lawyer.

Yesterday, she had left.A frosty-faced Theresa had held the door. Daniel was alone, except for the dogs. Daniel had not known how he would feel, but the answer to that was deeply, deeply sad. It was not the visceral half-fury, half blasphemous grieving response he had had when Ruby had passed. This was quieter, the grief of an opportunity lost rather than an entire future. It stung, certainly, but it did not feel as mortal a wound as holding Ruby’s hand as she fell silent, along with all the machines.

This morning, the apartment was quieted, with the peculiar silence of somewhere that had expected more noise but hadn’t got it. He slid out of bed, careful not to disturb Rosie as she lay asleep on his bed, the first time that had ever been allowed despite being the easiest decision he had ever made. As he moved toward the kitchen to make the coffee, for one today instead of two, he had caught himself in the mirror. He was a good-looking man, in a way, normally. Handsome, even, with great hair and green eyes even Barbara had called spell-binding within the last few months. He was strong, fit, slim. He looked like himself, today. He had absolutely no idea how that was even possible, given the turbulence he was feeling inside. Perhaps the slight but observable sadness in his eyes, the tighter set of the mouth? He gave up. This mirror had been here for five years, and he couldn’t remember ever having used it before.

Today, in the first week of August, he had returned to the veterinary surgery, and Rosie’s vet Katie had given him the bad news. His world was not just shattered, now. It was over. Over, but for Rosie, he corrected himself. The triple whammy – Ruby, Barbara, and now Rosie. There was no coming back from this.

Chapter 1 – Coffee Is Not Good For You

There is in life a cruel, almost vindictive serendipity. Those moments when you are at your lowest, and something makes you smile, or when you are celebrating, and something makes you sad. They stand out from the rest of life, because they are outliers of human experience. Daniel Mitchell knew the taxonomy well enough by now. He’d spent enough time steering clients around those moments. It was one of his less useful specialisms.

Life threw such a curveball at Daniel that morning. It happened as he was sitting in his usual seat in the corner of Rob’s Roasters, the improbably-named café on Madison he visited every Saturday morning after walking the dogs. One week on, and he was staring the abyss in the face. Well, abysses didn’t have faces, but that was his general idea.

On the table next to him, though, an interaction horribly similar to his conversation with Barbara was happening. It was very nearly as triggering for him as his own had been.

In the seat on the opposite side of her table to the one Daniel occupied at his, a tall, slim, elegant woman in her thirties was receiving the same news he had, although without the extra dimension of losing her partner to one of the same sex as him. Her news reporter seemed much nastier, though.

Daniel thought he had seen the woman in here before, once or twice, though he didn’t know her name, and had never spoken to her. She had a nice face, he remembered. Memory was required, because today that face was distorted in anger. Their conversation broke into his reverie of doom, already at the shouting stage.

“I don’t give a shit who she is, Michael! You cheated on me with her, and I am not in a forgiving mood. Just because you have to sleep with every slut who bats their eyes at you does not mean I have to tolerate it. You have until six pm to get out of the apartment, or I’m calling the police to throw you out.”

“Keep your voice down, Samantha. It’s my apartment too. And Tilly’s. You can’t throw me out.” The man, presumably Michael, was calm, if embarrassed. Daniel was offended on her behalf, that this man was being so neutral, when she was so passionate. Until he remembered his own stunned retreat into professional mask, when it had happened to him.

“You chucked all that in the trash can when you slept with another slut, Michael! Out, or the police. Your choice.”

Daniel had the correct advice ready before he knew he had formed it – custody, assets, the exact language that would end Michael’s threats before they could develop. He clamped his mouth shut, to hold it back. He’d stopped being the man people called in these situations, more or less. He was working on stopping, anyway. But he could still see how this would go. Like any devastation, it would follow the same stages. Denial, Anger, Pleading, Begging, Appeasement. Samantha, unaware of this wealth of expertise immediately to hand, moved on the pleading stage.

“Why, Michael? What is it about me, or about you, that means we are not good together? We have an okay time, don’t we?”

“I’ve been bored for months. Tiffany offered her sweet, sexy little body, and I accepted with alacrity,” he sneered, deliberately cruel. “So much easier than all that flowers and chocolates crap you need. So you can fuck off with your police. You can move out. Tilly can stay with me and Tiff.”

“There is no way on God’s earth that I am going to leave Tilly with a shit like you, Michael. Not for one solitary second.”

Finally, a threat she certainly would be able to execute on. Any court in the state would give her sole custody on these facts, if true.

“She’s my daughter too, Samantha. But you can take her with you, and good riddance.” Michael was as cruel, and as stupid, as Daniel had suspected. The spell of defiance from Samantha was short-lived, though. She had already moved to the next stage, begging. Appeasement would be next, of course.

“Come on, Michael! You don’t mean that! You don’t really mean any of this, do you? Let’s go home, and open a bottle of wine, and talk this through.”

“No, Samantha. You want me gone? Fine, I’ll go. I’d rather have a nice, sexy, willing twenty-four-year-old, than a dried up thirty-six-year-old with delusions of her own worth. I’ll be putting the apartment on the market on Monday. It’ll go fast, so you’d better find somewhere else for you two to live. And don’t bother asking for any money, because the answer will be no.”

“Michael! You don’t mean that. Really, darling, this is just a huge misunderstanding. Is this about Cressington? I can just not take that job, if it means you will -”

“I won’t, Samantha. When you bring Tilly back from Kumon, I’ll be gone. You can tell her anything you want. I don’t care.”

With that, he got to his feet, and slung his jacket over his shoulders.

“This is goodbye, Samantha. It’s been nice, but let’s move on, eh?”

She looked up at ‘Michael’, and Daniel could see the enormity of her shock, exactly as he had felt that same shock two weeks earlier. In that moment, she was him.

“Nice? It’s been fourteen years and a daugh-” she began. But he was gone.

Samantha buried her face in her arms, and sobbed.

Daniel didn’t know what to do. Should he try to comfort her? Should he mention last week? Or would that just be intrusive, too invasive on her moment of grief? He watched as the man Michael got into a cab outside the café, and felt he should do something, but he didn’t know what. He daren’t put his arm around her, as he would have done with Barbara. Not in these enlightened times.

The decision was taken out of his hands. Samantha sat back, her tear-stained face no longer as pretty, for obvious reasons. Her mascara had run, for one thing, and there were black smears on the arms of her beautiful, white fluffy sweater. She looked one way and then the other, as if seeking a white knight, but none appeared. Then, as if ordained by the serendipity itself, her eyes locked on Daniel’s.

His lips moved immediately and involuntarily into a sympathetic smile, but whatever she saw there, it triggered precipitate action, and she was off out of the café in seconds, the greyhound leaving the trap. The server saw her go and trotted to the door, but gave up the chase. The server, whose name he knew was Jess, moved to the phone, probably to call the police.

Daniel saw a purse and a jacket hanging off the back of the chair Samantha had vacated. He stood up quickly, banging his knee on her table, but tried to ignore the pain, reaching over to snag both items, limping over to where Jess was waiting for an answer. “What’s their check, Jess?” She would know which table he meant.

She looked at him, pulling the old-fashioned receiver in to her chest. “Eighteen dollars twenty, Danny.”

He handed over a fifty-dollar bill.

“This will cover theirs and mine, Jess. Give her a break today, okay?” He grabbed his own jacket and shrugged into it, and then, purse in hand and jacket over his forearm, followed Samantha, still limping slightly from the bruise to his knee. Or possibly from the unequal weight of his guilt at not having helped her earlier.

He saw her standing fifty yards away down the street, looking hopelessly lost. He was struck that for once in his life, he knew precisely how another human being was feeling, because he had felt exactly that devastation seven days ago. He approached her, already registering that her condition was no better than his last week.

“Miss? Miss!”

When she didn’t respond, he tried a gambit which had not received enough thought, and which drew a response he was not expecting at all.

“Samantha?”

She turned almost poetically slowly. Her sad, sad eyes narrowed, and he saw the fury incandesce in them, a bomb with blue touch paper he had just ignited.

“Oh, great, the man from the café! Come to gloat, have you? Think you know me, do you, because you overheard a juicy chat? Come to try it on with the woman who just got dumped, like some sort of romance vulture? Well, you can fuck off! Fuck right off now!” she screamed in his face.

If he had been expecting this, or anything like it, he might have reacted differently. Later, he thought he would normally probably have just done as she wanted. He was not over his own shock, though, not by a long chalk, and a second one of this magnitude froze him in place long enough to reply, with the outward calm of long professional practice in surprising situations.

“I just wanted to return these. You left them in the café.” He proffered the bag, and when Samantha stared at it, aghast, he urged it and the jacket into her hand, turned and left, the limp slowing his getaway to a comic pace.

Chapter 2: An Unexpected Offer

“Everybody got coffee?” Bernie was obsessed, in meetings, with every participant’s hydration level. “This won’t be long, but I need everybody to pay real attention.”

Daniel wasn’t aware of any other kind, but he let it pass. His attention wasn’t available, anyway. Tomorrow he would have to say goodbye to his very best friend, the labrador who had been through everything with him, and had remained entirely loyal and sympathetic. It didn’t really matter what ‘big announcement’ Bernie had, Daniel knew. It would never be more important to him than her. Nor even close.

Bernie did his best, though.

“Some of us were at the board meeting, yesterday. Not you, Dan, for great reasons. But it was a momentous board meeting, folks. Momentous.” He paused, presumably to let the momentousness of his as-yet undeclared news sink in. Gradually it occurred to him that the gently expectant faces were waiting for a little more than an assessment of the momentousness.

“Yesterday, the board agreed – well, all the board except Dan, here, who was away for compassionate reasons. Thanks for coming in today, Dan, I really appreciate it, and so will the rest of the board.”

Daniel could see no question nor any obvious response, so he merely nodded.

Bernie tried again.

“The board agreed that we would sell the firm – the entire firm, to Goodison, Maxwell and Irving.” He looked around the faces, seeing surprise and some delight, but more expectancy. It was not enough.

“They are going to pay one point one billion, in cash. That’s almost exactly eighteen months of billings, so an excellent deal for us. Many of you have equity in the business, after that squeeze eight years ago, so you will do very well out of it. The rest of you, I can happily say nearly all of your jobs are safe. GMI have many more strings to their bow, of course, so they will be able to wind up the billings from your clients. That’s why they are doing it, of course. They know we have a great client list, with a lot of bigger companies they can offer more services to, and they will need us to plug those in. Josie, Maria, Dan, can we have a word, after this?”

Daniel could see what that word would be, without having it. Josie and Maria were the two senior partners of the Family Law division, theoretically the smallest part of the firm. GMI had no Family Law department, he knew. So either Josie and Maria were not going to make the cut, or they would have to start a new division within GMI. Family was one of the best performing departments at Ashram, Semberg, Mitchell and Moloney, responsible for at least a quarter of the revenues. Every major name in the world, when their relationships hit the buffers, would call ASMM first. Every green light movie star, every major name author, politician, sports star and TV personality would call. Not because it was known, but because it got results. Results in terms of cash, yes, but also results in terms of being able to stay friends, usually, even in the most acrimonious splits.

Daniel himself had built that business, until three years ago when he had become the chief financial officer of the firm. Josie and Maria had been his junior partners, when he, Daniel Mitchell, had bailed the company out to the tune of six million dollars, getting twenty-five percent of the equity and his name on the door. That was how he kept his hand in – when a big name wanted the Name, he would join the team, but Josie or Maria would still do all the heavy lifting unless they asked his advice. He wouldn’t even bill. He described his own role as ‘client appeasement’. Josie and Maria were the best in the business, and no longer needed him unless the client looked disappointed.

When the others had gone, Bernie held the other two back. Daniel didn’t even get out of his chair.

“Ladies, I don’t need to tell you that GMI have no Family department. They are relying on ASMM for the continued excellent progress on that side of things. They don’t want to drop it, no sir. It’s a big part of why they bought the business.”

The relief the two women were feeling was obvious to Daniel. Smiles replaced the concerned frowns, and they sat back in their chairs, the way the heads of Litigation, Corporate, Finance, Regulatory and Industries had when the deal was announced.

“What about Danny, Bernie?” Maria asked. She and Daniel were close, after he had gone to bat for her in her own trouble, getting her out of it with her two boys and the family home. Josie, too, was a good friend.

“I’ll be talking to Danny in a moment, Maria. I just didn’t want you two worrying, given the nature of the buyer.”

They nodded, and with a sympathetic smile to Daniel, they both gathered their things and left the room.

Bernie blushed, even as they did so.

“They don’t need me, do they, Bernie?” Daniel said, to give the man an out.

“I knew you’d get there before I had to say anything, Dan. It’s particularly bloody coming as it does on the back of your recent, ah, changes. Don’t think I’m not sensible of that.”

“Not even to boost their brand new Family Division?”

“I could ask, if you want me to?” Bernie said, his eyebrows showing genuine, if uncertain, enthusiasm, as they moved like breakdancing caterpillars.

“No, it’s okay. I can console myself with just over a hundred and fifty million in cash.”

“There are a couple of problems, there.” Bernie’s blush had moved into warning territory for a cardiac arrest.

“Go on. The name?”

“Yes. And we will need you, of course, to actually do the deal.”

Danny had known when Bernie had announced the deal that both of these were coming. He was the only person in the firm who had ever sold a law firm, having done so several times in the past. And removing his name from all the registrations, branding and so on would be foolishly expensive. He nodded again.

“They wanted to offer a million, for continued use of your name, but I’ve held out for five. It’s far more common, and normal for a firm of our size.”

“Well done you, Bernie, but let’s make it easier for them. Five, but as a donation in their name and mine, jointly to Best Friends Animal Society. They can milk any PR they can get from that, too.”

“Well, that’s very generous, Dan! Not that I am at all surprised, of course.” Bernie almost rubbed his hands with glee.

“I’ll also put myself at Tim’s disposal for the deal work.” Tim Jensen was the head of Corporate, and it would normally fall to him to do the corporate finance work on a deal involving the firm, but he hadn’t done a law firm transaction, and he would be worrying.

“That’s great, Dan, really great. You are being great about this!” Bernie’s smile didn’t quite reach his eyes, and Daniel knew this tell, of old.

“What’s the other thing, Bernie? The one you really don’t want to ask?”

Bernie sighed, and slumped into the nearest chair.

“I’m going to miss you, Dan. Truly. There’s no one sharper than you in a meeting room. This one is a doozy.”

“Well, best just lay it on me, Bern.”

“They want to pay you – well, everyone - in three or four instalments. Fifty-five million a year, in your case.”

“No.” Danny had reacted viscerally, but the truth was that with his experience, he didn’t even have to consider this. Such terms would mean him giving GMI a loan of £165 million, interest-free. For no good reason.

“They’re very keen on this, Danny.”

“Donald Trump was very keen on a Nobel Peace prize. You can’t always get what you want.”

Bernie’s caterpillars seemed to have been tranquillised by this resistance, and slid down to his brow. He needed more than a flat refusal, and it had been crass of Daniel to give him no way out. He needed more from Daniel.

"Okay, well here’s how you and the guys put a pin into it. You say that if they don’t want to pay for the equity upfront, then they are not buying it upfront, and they can pay the relevant percentage of discretionary earnings to the people they haven’t paid out. For me, that would be a little over five and a half per cent of their earnings plus ours, or fifty-seven million dollars and change, if my math is correct. Plus the fifty-five. And that’s just for the first year. Even with no growth, that would be doubling their cost.”

“They’ll never agree to that, Dan.”

Daniel chuckled, ruefully. “Of course they won’t, because it would cost them more than the same again. So they will drop the idea. Trust me.”

Bernie looked at him in amazement. “Is that why you offered the charity thing for your name, Dan? Because you knew something like this was coming?”

“Give and take, Bernie, you know my mantra. The place to do the deal is where both parties are equally unhappy.”

“Well, like I said, Dan, I’m going to miss you. We all will.”