The Bluffing Game (8 page)

I wrote, “That does sound miserable. I thought we were happy yesterday, though.”

“We were. But a roller coaster is not what I need right now.”

He was pulling away already, after one midnight flight. To be fair, it was the first night. I couldn’t deny that. But he was acting as though he’d already made a decision, already passed judgment.

I wrote back: “I’m willing to be there more. I’m willing to cut back on clients like this, where I have to leave suddenly.”

That little icon that showed he was typing but didn’t let me see the message yet was the more stressful part of the whole exchange.

He wrote: “But could you say this is your last one? Could you have warned me this might happen? You’re willing to change a little, but I can’t ask you to change altogether. It was worth a try, but I think our needs might be beyond reconciliation. I still love you, but I don’t think that’s enough to make this good for us.”

Thanks, Nick, for sounding so honest, caring, and reasonable while you stab me repeatedly in the heart. Thanks for making this a Shakespearean tragedy instead of a footnote in the ledger of my life. At least you know yourself well enough to see when you’re not up to a particular challenge.

I put the phone away, my head swimming now, and devoid of any good response to his sudden reversal and rejection. I was still dead tired from the overnight flight, worn out from arguing with Sterling first thing, and just about ready to collapse after this texted train wreck with Nick.

I wanted to fall asleep again, but I still had to convince Sterling to cancel his meeting with the opposition as a show of confidence to let them know he’d called their last bluff. That was the only way they’d ever drop the charges before the hearing, but I had run out of things to say. If he wasn’t convinced already, what more could be done?

I walked to the floor-to-ceiling window of the bedroom and looked out at the beach and the ocean. Sterling was out on one of the stone footpaths near the sand, talking to Andrea. He moved his hands a lot as he spoke, and after a second I realized they were arguing. Even if I went out to the balcony they’d be too far off for me to hear, but I wondered what they could be so heated about. Sterling was so on edge it wouldn’t surprise me if it was something as trivial as what he wanted for lunch.

Andrea left his side and came back toward the house. I decided I shouldn’t wait any longer before trying to convince him one more time to cancel the meeting. I went out to the balcony and down the stone steps, and before I could get to the beach I met Andrea on the path.

She said nothing, but shot me a glance of such piercing hatred that I nearly stepped back from her. Maybe she was just in a bad mood, but the duration of the look suggested otherwise. It made little sense to me, given that the two of us, as I perceived it, has ceased all possible avenues of competition. It set my mental gears turning, but they didn’t get far because Sterling came down the path next.

“If you cancel the meeting, it will be a show of strength,” I said.

Hands in his pockets. It had become his defensive gesture. “It’s too late for that. They’re already on their way here.”

“I saw you and Andrea from the window. Is everything okay?”

“It’s fine. She’s afraid if we lose this, she’ll be laid off.”

I frowned. “Really. What did she have to say about that?”

“It doesn’t matter.” He continued back toward the house.

I followed. “Yes it does. This case is none of her business. What exactly did she have to say?”

“She just wanted me to reassure her everything was fine.”

“And did you?”

“No, June, I didn’t. I told her there’s a chance we go to trial and the bad PR sinks me. Doesn’t she have a right to know if her job is in jeopardy?”

“But it’s not.” That face she’d given me wouldn’t go away. It made sense if she was afraid I was steering Victor in the wrong direction and costing her her job. But how could she possibly know my advice was ostensibly making things risky?

“How much have you confided in her?”

“Are you asking me that as my lawyer?”

“What else am I? Yes, I’m asking as your lawyer.”

He stopped walking and looked at the ground for a second, then said, “She’s been in on everything from the beginning. I needed someone besides my lawyers to vent to.”

“So she’s been aware of all your doubts, all your uncertainties from the beginning?”

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

Pieces started to fall into place in my head. “You do realize that makes her a liability. If any of the opposition has any kind of access to her, they could potentially know your weaknesses.”

He looked at me now. “Are you accusing her of something?” His expression warned me to pick my words carefully, as if accusing her meant accusing him, too. It was a delicate moment, requiring diplomatic tact.

I said, “I’m not necessarily accusing anyone. I’m just saying, every time these people come in, it does feel like they know how to make you sweat. Like they know you personally.”

He put his hands on his hips. “They’ve seen a lot of me by this point.”

“Even so. What gave them the confidence to bring this absurd claim forward? What chance could they have possibly expected to have without knowing you’d seek to settle out of court, that you’d be so afraid of bad PR that you’d entertain a completely nonsense money play? Do you know any of them personally?”

“No.”

“Well somehow, I don’t know how, I think they got the idea that you could be manipulated. And I find it very suspicious just how precisely on the mark they’ve been. I didn’t see it before, but now that I realize it’s possible, I’m betting you have a leak, whether it’s Andrea or someone else.”

“You think someone’s feeding them information about how nervous I am.”

“I do. Or at least, I think that someone was a leak at the beginning, or possible even before they came forward. Who would stand to gain the most from it? It could be gain by having a share in the settlement or gain by your stock plummeting from the bad press.”

Sterling looked away as if I were inventing some wild flight of fancy. “The only ones who know me well enough are the executive board, my lawyers, and Andrea. Nobody else who works for me has ever seen me in doubt.”

“And if I’m not mistaken, your lawyers and executive board have been unanimous in their support of this case being quickly ended before bad PR without a penny paid to these people.”

“They have.”

“What about people who don’t work for you?”

“I keep my doubts private.”

That certainly narrowed the field. Narrowed it to one prime suspect, as I thought. “Has Andrea ever encouraged you to pay out and settle with them?”

“You can’t blame her for wanting to avoid the bad PR. I was the one venting about that.”

“But has she encouraged you to pay out?”

“You’re taking it out of context.”

“I am absolutely not. Has she ever advised you to make a settlement?”

He didn’t like where this was going, and probably still thought I was being paranoid, but he took a deep breath and said, “Yes.”

“When?”

He sighed and looked me in the eye again. “Since the beginning, after I told her it could be a PR nightmare.”

“Since then?”

“Every time I’ve hired a new lawyer. But she just wants to keep her job.”

“Even if that’s the case, even if she’s merely self-interested, she’s doing exactly what the opposition wants. Intentional or not, she’s compromising your position. She’s encouraging you to doubt your legal counsel. She’s pushing you to give out money to a legally baseless claim, and in so doing, she is acting in the exact same way as someone who is trying to help them. Why have you been listening to her?”

Victor was fuming now, and not looking at me. “It was never her idea. It was always me trying to think out loud and work through things, and she would ask a question about something I said. And she’d keep asking questions until it felt like I’d been doubting all along and she had just helped me to see how I really felt.” He turned his head toward the sea, the crash of waves hidden by the sand, but the blue horizon visible beyond.

He said, “She wasn’t turning me against my lawyers, she was turning me against myself, and making me feel like it was my own idea. Today was the first time she openly brought herself and her interests into it and actually started the conversation.”

I nodded. “Because she’s desperate. This is her last ditch effort to get you to settle, whether because she’s really afraid you’ll lose or because she’s on their side. The end result is the same—you show them weakness, and they feed on it. Let me ask you something.”

“What now?”

“Now that you know she was fueling your doubts on purpose, for whatever reason, do you still want her around?”

“No.”

“And what do you plan to say to these people who are trying to weasel a fortune out of you without a legal basis for it? These people who potentially were being fed information about your private insecurities from the beginning, and got all of their courage and strength from that alone?”

He looked at his watch. “They’ll be here any second.”

“Do you know what you’re going to say to them?”

He closed his eyes, as if accepting an unpleasant but inevitable truth. It was a moment of growth for him, I could tell. But he was the sort of person to learn from his mistakes, and once the lesson was firmly in hand, he would not repeat his missteps. That much I had known since I first met him.

He opened his eyes and turned away from the sea. “All right, you want me to give them a show of strength? Follow me.”

He strode up the path toward the house, with more power and purpose in his walk than I’d seen since, well, ever, the furnace of anger inside him burning hard under his sleek exterior. I had a feeling I was going to see the best side of him in a moment, the side of him I’d seen that evening on the beach when we’d swum out and back and his energy had been overflowing. The side of him that had gotten him here to the top of all society in the first place.

By the time we reached the meeting room, Andrea had already shown the opposition into the room, and there they sat waiting for us, giddy as ever, expecting to be handed the prize they’d fought for all this time, the prize they saw as a low-hanging fruit from a tree of money that couldn’t protect itself from exploitation.

Victor didn’t sit down, so I followed his lead and stood next to him.

With no introduction or pleasantries, he said. “I called this meeting for one reason, and one reason only—to offer you people a final chance to drop these laughable charges before Judge Wilson throws your worthless case out of court tomorrow.” He smiled then, but not in a nice way. “Now I have to admit, I’m losing a lot by asking you to bow out now, because I’d much rather see the miserable looks on your faces when law and reason boot you to the curb less than twenty-four hours from now. But I believe in mercy, however late in the game it may be. So what do you say? Admit you’ve been wrong from the start right now, or listen to Judge Wilson explain tomorrow just how devoid of sense you’ve been?”

They had been bluffing since the charges were filed, and they saw this speech as another bluff from Sterling. I knew it wasn’t. Nevertheless, the opposing lawyer looked up at Victor completely unfazed.

“It’s not we who are being given the choice,” she said. “Your choice—your last one before this case gets heard and then sent to trial, where we will assuredly win—is to agree to the settlement we’ve discussed, or face the consequences. You can talk down to us and insult us all you like, but it doesn’t change the facts.”

Sterling raised his eyebrows. “If you think coming after my money out of no justification but greed is going to earn you any respect from me, you’re mistaken. And as for facts, chew on this one: I’ll see your sorry ass in court.”

He left the room.

After a beat to let that exit sink in, I put a sheet on the table. “I took the liberty of preparing a statement to formally drop the charges. You know where to sign.”

And then I followed Victor and left the opposition empty-handed at the table. Andrea was standing outside the room, but Victor had apparently said nothing to her. Our eyes met, and I smiled with as much sincerity as I could muster, aware that she was likely minutes from the proverbial guillotine.

“Show them out, would you?” I said. I didn’t wait around to see what contempt might spread across her face after that, and felt no sadness at the thought that I might have just seen her for the last time.

~

The rest of the day was spent reworking my statement for the hearing tomorrow, making sure I had every loophole covered, every context accounted for, and a completely watertight argument against any possible basis for their claims. It was remarkable, in retrospect, that they’d managed to make it this far, and I personally thought that without Andrea, they wouldn’t have stood a chance—she might have given them the initial bait of Sterling’s insecurity or someone else might have; I supposed we’d never know which—but without her continued fueling of his doubts, it would have ended long before I came into the picture. I supposed I had her to thank for that, after all I’d learned about myself from this case.