When we arrive at the address in Beverly Hills, Leona is waiting by the side gate. She leads us into the pool house she’s renting and takes the seat across from us. “I need you to promise this will never get out,” she says. “I can’t afford to lose my job right now, and they’d find a way to fire me, I assure you.”
“Your name will never come up, unless you change your mind,” Ben says.
His voice seems to soothe her. He comes across as trustworthy to strangers. He’s even starting to seem trustworthy to me. I wish he wasn’t.
She crosses the room to the kitchen counter and grabs a file. “I made copies of the expense reports. It’s been going on for years.”
I take it from her and open it on the coffee table so Ben and I can look at the same time.
The amounts spent are outrageous. Some are out of town, accompanied by massive hotel bills and greens fees, but most of them are in LA, at a club near their office.
“It’s always pissed me off,” she says. “We have employees who need to work a second job just to survive, and these assholes are blowing twenty grand on girls?”
She tells us most of the staff knows nothing about these outings until the guys come in talking about it the next day, with an expense report filed a few weeks later. Only one female, Lauren, was ever invited. “They said she could come but only if she got on stage,” Leona scoffs. “As if she’d want to come anyway. What woman would feel comfortable in that situation?”
And that’s precisely the problem: men in power keep the circle closed by making it uncomfortable for women to step inside, which leads to a conference room full of men in gray suits making more decisions that only benefit them.
“We need to make sure we go about this in a way that it can’t be traced to her,” I say, once we’re in the car. “We’ll have to work backward. Get proof from the strip clubs that those charges went on a company card. I know an investigator who can help us.”
“And talk to Lauren, if we can find her,” he adds.
I notice he’s driving farther into Beverly Hills, rather than back toward the office. “Where are we going?”
“I’ve got to run by a friend’s house,” he says.
“A friend?” I ask. I sound wary, which I am, but inside I’m the tiniest bit pleased. Kyle and I were on different coasts and had separate lives. If I’m ever with someone again, I don’t want to be on the outside.
“Don’t worry,” he says, “no one’s home. But he lives around the corner and asked me to pick up his mail.”
I’m equal parts relieved and disappointed.
A few minutes later, he pulls into the circular drive of a monstrously tacky mansion.
I laugh as I climb from the car. “You have friends who live here?”
“They used to live here. Tali hated it. It’s on the market now, and they moved into a much nicer place off Mulholland Drive.”
“It’s the turrets,” I say. “Were they worried the Romans would invade?”
“Hayes went through a very long, very strange phase before he met his wife. It seems to be over now.”
He enters a code into the front door and crosses the hall to disable the alarm.
“You’re sure we’re not going to get arrested for trespassing?”
“I’m sure I won’t be,” he says with a grin, scooping the mail off the floor.
He leads me through the mostly empty house and we walk out to a large covered terrace and down a flight of stairs, where a long, rectangular pool glimmers in the moonlight. At its edge, he kicks off his shoes and rolls up his pants before taking a seat, letting his legs slide into the water. Warily, I kick off my shoes and sit beside him.
I look around. “So where are your friends, anyway? Why can’t they get their own mail?”
“They’re in Italy working on a second kid this week,” he says.
“Only married people would refer to having sex repeatedly as work.”
He laughs. “They’d change your thoughts on marriage. They’re happy together.”
I want to say, “sure, until one of them gets bored”, but a part of me is tired of being that person. A part of me wants to be a bit more like Ben, someone who still has faith in the concept of forever.
“You’ve done some family law,” I say quietly. “How can you still be such an optimist?”
“There’s a reason I no longer do it. Once you see bad marriages, you start looking for more of them. You start believing that fifty percent of couples split up, and the other fifty percent are fooling themselves. And I know that’s not the truth. It isn’t that way for my friends. It wasn’t like that for my parents.”
His eyes darken for a quick second. I’ve known other people who lost a parent young, and most of them seem to have accepted it, moved past it. I get the sense, somehow, that Ben hasn’t.
“That must have been so hard on your mom,” I venture. “She’s lucky she had you and your brother.”
“Actually, there are four of us. It’s me, then Graham, then Simon, and then Colin.”
I blink. His mother was widowed with four young sons, one of them a newborn. My heart gives a small twist. “God,” I whisper, “she must have been so overwhelmed.”
“She was,” he says quietly. “It took a long time for her to come back from it.”
I want to ask what he means, how long is a “long time”, but it’s clearly a topic he’s not comfortable with. Seeing that repressed sadness in Ben makes something soften inside me. I have an almost overwhelming desire to touch him, to twine my fingers with his. I slide my hands beneath my thighs instead.
“What about you?” he asks. “No siblings?”
I shake my head. “No, thank God. My mom always wanted more but it didn’t happen.”
His brow furrows. “You wouldn’t have wanted siblings?”
“Sure, if they were my mother’s kids. My dad always implied it was her fault she didn’t get pregnant again, but then nothing happened with his next wife either, and I’m glad it didn’t.” It would have crushed my mother to see him create an entirely new family when she’d wanted it for them so much. “Go ahead: tell me how wrong it is to gloat over a couple’s infertility.”
He laughs, leaning toward me. “I’d have expected nothing less.” He kisses me then, his lips soft and certain on mine, as if to say, “it’s okay that you’re like this, it’s okay that you’re petty, that you’re vicious in court, that you push people away. I like you anyhow.”
He pulls back slowly, reluctantly, and helps me to my feet. I kind of wish we were staying. I wish he’d kissed me a little longer.
“If it weren’t for the turrets,” I suggest, “this would be a pretty nice place.”
“It’s okay.” He grins. “Not as amazing as your mom’s though, obviously, with that shelf of doom hanging over her cats.”
I don’t even think…I push him. He isn’t expecting it, and I wasn’t entirely expecting him to lose his balance—hoping, yes, but not expecting—and he goes right into the deep end. My laughter echoes over the pool deck, and I have not a moment’s guilt until his head emerges…and he’s flailing.