CHAPTER ONE
Jack
Ihated being a lawyer.
No, that wasn’t really true. I loved standing up for truth and justice. I loved helping people who found themselves in trouble and needed someone with a savvy head for the law to guide them out of it and into a better life. I lived for that moment when one of my clients stepped out of the legal woods they’d been lost in and breathed a sigh of relief.
Except that wasn’t generally the kind of law my family’s firm practiced. Salisbury and Salisbury—the second Salisbury being my uncle Roger, definitely not me—was a corporate law firm. “That’s where the money and influence is,” Dad always said.
He should know. John Salisbury, Sr. was not only the senior partner of the firm, he was a state senator who had already announced he’d be running for governor in the fall. Dad was powerful and sometimes a little scary. He came from one of the most impressive, high-society families in the country. So did Mom. So did I, come to think of it. But Dad embodiedthe old ruling class and their archaic ideas about caste and alpha superiority that most people liked to think had died out a generation or two before.
Spoiler alert, it hadn’t. No matter how many equality laws had been passed and social changes had happened.
I sighed and sat back as I finished my first draft of the brief for the pro bono case I had somehow convinced Dad to let me take. Dad never would have let me represent the small business who had been falsely accused of misrepresenting their profits to shareholders, but its CEO was a friend of one of Dad’s most important campaign donors, and he’d agreed to take the case because he needed those donations.
I was willing to overlook the high-level back-scratching and the blatant tit-for-tat because I loved fighting for the little guy. What was the point of all the power and prestige I’d been born into if I couldn’t use it to help people now and then?
As I read over everything I’d just written, I caught myself humming along to one of my favorite show tunes that sounded from my computer’s speaker. I had a whole playlist of musical theater that I’d made to keep myself sane through the tedious, corporate days. I loved musical theater, and I’d been told I had an amazing voice.
Okay, that was being a little too modest. I had an outstanding baritone voice. And I’d actually been allowed to use it way back in college, when I’d starred in a production ofAnnieas Daddy Warbucks. But when I’d gushed to Mom and Dad about how much I’d loved the whole experience and how I wanted to change my major from Law to Theater? Well, you would have thought I’d told them I planned to shave my head and hike naked in the mountains with a group of monks.
It wasn’t funny, but I laughed anyhow as I stared at my computer screen, trying to focus. The image of me wandering through the mountains as a monk was…actually, it was amazingand liberating. I would have been naked, but I would have been free.
A knock on the doorframe of my open office door shook me out of my thoughts.
“Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Salisbury,” my assistant, Imogen, a competent, middle-aged beta, said, taking a step into the office.
“Hey, Imogen,” I said informally, smiling in the way my dad hated. I wasn’t supposed to be friendly with our employees, but I considered Imogen a friend. One of the few I had.
“Morning, Jack” Imogen replied in a cozy manner that would have my dad fuming. “I have the fourth quarter profits for Quantum Adventures,” she said, walking forward to place the file she carried on the desk. “And I’ll have statements from the auditors that doublechecked everything by Monday.”
“You don’t have to rush,” I told her. “I’m probably going to be out on Monday anyhow. No need to put in late nights over the weekend for me.”
“Aaw, you’re a sweetie,” Imogen said. “And vastly underappreciated in this place.”
My face flushed hot, but not because of anything Imogen had said or done. The burst of heat was because I still hadn’t come to grips with what I was about to do this weekend.
“I don’t want to throw a wet blanket on anything,” Imogen went on, “but Mr. Salisbury, Sr. wants you finished with this case as soon as possible so you can focus your efforts on other things while he’s campaigning.”
We shared a silent eye-roll.
“Right,” I said, falling into seriousness. “Thank you, Imogen.”
“Hang in there,” Imogen said with a wink, then headed out.
I blew out a heavy breath and sank back in my chair. It wasn’t really a surprise to me that Dad wanted me working on his campaign more than helping clients. I was pretty sure he hadspies all through the office who reported everything I did to him so he could berate me for “failing to focus”, as he liked to call it, later. I’d spent my entire life having everything I did reported back to my dad and being grilled about it all when Dad had the time. I was the heir apparent, the only child. I was John Clarence Salisbury, Jr.
And no one ever let me forget it.
The show tune swelling from my desktop speakers reached its crescendo, and since it was a song of angst and freedom from the hit musical that was taking the cultural world by storm just then, I was tempted to belt out the chorus along with the singer. I might have even closed my eyes, thrown my arms wide, and imagined myself up on stage at the Barrington Performing Arts Center, an audience before me and all the joy and freedom I could handle right there within my grasp.
But a second later, my dad stepped into my office. Without knocking or introducing himself.
“Grab your coat,” he said without so much as a “hello” or “how’s work?”. “We’ll be late if we don’t leave right away. And turn that garbage off. I’ve told you to stop listening to it.”
All of the potential elation of the music I’d tried to wrap myself in flattened.
“Sure, Dad,” I said, grabbing my mouse and clicking off the music program, then shutting everything down that I’d been working on.
