“I’m so sorry!”
He nods, acknowledging my condolences. “It was rough, especially on my dad. He had a heart attack less than a year after shepassed away.” He takes a sip of coffee. “I think he died of a broken heart.”
My chest feels hot and tight. “So your parents had a good marriage.”
“Oh, yeah. Mom once said that home is a person, not a place. They adored each other.” He’s silent for a beat, his mouth curved in a soft smile. “They were married forty years, and they still held hands. I used to catch them dancing together in the kitchen with no music.”
“Oh, how wonderful!”
“Yeah.” He takes a sip of coffee. “They adored my sister and me, too. We were a really close family.”
“You were lucky.”
“Yeah.” He looks at me, and I get the feeling he’s seeing far too much. I’m afraid he’s picking up on my badly parented inner damage and is going to ask about my family, so I change the subject.
“The kind of law you practice—it sounds really...” I search for a word.
“Boring?” His lips quirk up.
I smile. I’d looked up his firm on the internet. “I was thinking ‘dry,’ but I was going to say ‘complicated.’”
He grins. “Very diplomatic of you. You might have a future in corporate law.”
“No, thanks.”
The prototype of Lily’s dimple flashes when he smiles. “Actually, my work’s a lot more interesting than it sounds. I mainly figure out compromises. I try to find win-win solutions.”
My eyebrows rise. “For both parties, or just your clients?”
“Ouch.” He puts a hand on his chest as if I’d just wounded him. “Sounds like you don’t have a very good opinion of attorneys.”
I don’t, but it’s an opinion I formed when my parents divorced. My mother complained long and loud about the incompetence of her attorney, the viciousness of my father’s lawyer, and how they both were only interested in making money. I lift my shoulders.
Zack leans forward. “Here’s the way it works: it’s my job to help my clients get what they want, but in order to do that, I have to convince them to make concessions, too. That’s really the hardest part of my job. Our firm has a reputation for settling things quickly, but that won’t happen if deals aren’t equitable.”
I raise my eyebrows. “So you’re an attorney who believes in fairness?”
“Yeah, I do. That’s the whole concept of justice.” He says this with an utter lack of guile.“I know it goes against the stereotype.”
“How did you end up practicing this particular type of law?”
“My dad’s grocery store went through a hard time when I was in college. A big-box store tried to buy him out for a ridiculously low amount—they wanted to tear down his store and expand their parking lot. Dad refused. They told him he couldn’t compete and they’d run him out of business, so he’d better fall in line. He still refused.”
He takes a sip of coffee. “The new store went up, and things got nasty. They lowballed him on everything. He started selling specialties they didn’t offer—organic foods, local bakery items, special cut meats—but every time, they’d add something similar. And with their advertising budget, they’d outpromote him.”
“That’s terrible!”
“Yeah. The big corporation must have spent a fortune, trying to run him out of business. Dad finally hit on something they couldn’t duplicate: he started barbecuing meat. He put a smoker right outside his store. The scent wafted over the parking lot and attracted shoppers in droves.”
I smile. “What a great idea!”
He nods. “They tried to sell their own barbecue, but Dad had won the barbecue competition at the state fair and was well-known around town for bringing his smoker to charitable benefits. He had a local reputation and a secret recipe, and they wouldn’t compete. When people came in to buy Dad’s take-home barbecue, they’d find all kinds of other locally made specialty products and buy those, too.” He grins. “Within a year, Dad’s business was flourishing again.”
“That’s a great story.”
Zack leans back in his chair. “Dad said that if they’d made him a decent offer at the beginning, he would have taken it. It was the bullying that made him fight. So that made me realize this is an area of law practice where there was a lot of room for improvement.”
It occurs to me that Zack is his father’s son. If I try to keep him from seeing Lily—especially now that he knows Margaret wants him to—he’s going to persist.
