Page 10 of Take What Hurts

Mackenzie didn’t eat a bite. Every time she thought about eating part of the meal in front of her, saliva that she knew was the precursor to vomit flooded her mouth. So she swallowed it down instead and sat in silence, watching her mother hum happily around forkfuls of food and wine.

When the waiter returned with the bill, her mother motioned across the table to Mackenzie and with all the sweetness of a woman who was not her mother said, “My wonderful daughter is treating me this evening.”

“Oh, how lovely, madam,” he crooned, with a simpering smile and a deep bow that made Mackenzie want to gag all over again. Following his groveling, he placed the folder down in front of Mackenzie, smiling again before walking away.

Her mother narrowed her eyes, challenging Mackenzie to refuse. Finally, her mother shrugged. “It’s the least you can do after you ruined our dinner with your crying over something that happened years ago.” She stood from the table, draining her glass of wine. “Make sure the usual payment is in my bank account on Monday this week—I’m going away and will need it sooner than Wednesday. Make sure you tip that waiter properly too. See you next time, dear.” She threw the farewell over her shoulder, then stalked out of the restaurant with a smile and an air kiss to the waiter.

Mackenzie sat and stared at the zeros on the bill while the busboy cleared the table around her. Her knuckles whitened around the folder. Her cheeks were still wet. Her heart rammed against her ribs and vibrated through her cavernous chest and into her limbs. Shuddering and trying to stay in control of her own body, she stumbled up out of her chair and woodenly approached the host to pay the bill. Vaguely she wondered if everyone in the restaurant realized just how much of a secondary character Mackenzie was in her own life, and as she pushed her way out into the cold Seattle night, she uttered another little prayer that nobody of importance ever discovered who she was in the presence of her mother.

SEVEN

MACKENZIE

Mackenzie might as well have been a wrung sponge. Her mother had been in finer form than usual on Friday, and that weekend Mackenzie oscillated between wallowing in a well of self-loathing, in the wake of her apparent inability to implement any of the strategies her therapist had taught her to manage her mother, and positively sobbing into her pillow about, well, all of it. She went so far as to unblock Reilly’s Instagram and torture herself by scrolling through photo after photo of Reilly’s happy life with her happy little family before she blocked it again and savagely threw her phone across the room.

Then, once she’d mostly finished feeling sorry for herself and promised herself, again, she would start standing up to her mother, she stood in front of the mirror and repeated the sentences her therapist told her to use in these moments—I am not the reason for my mother’s unhappiness. I cannot be responsible for my mother’s life. Then she worked.

Work was a double-pronged strategy. It was a productive distraction. One that moved her closer to her goals on the partnership track and necessitated she block out every thought other than those that directly related to the file she was working on. In the moments when she was most honest with herself, she was self-aware enough to admit it wasn’t healthy. But what could she do? Among her mother, Reilly’s whole situation, and an apartment that held so much, it was all she could do to keep herself from spiraling into a bottomless pit of despair and examining every failure in her life. So she took herself to the office. Where she was powerful and confident.

Importantly, she took herself away from the apartment.

It was another in a long line of things Mackenzie should have been stronger about in her personal life. Reilly had offered her the apartment when she’d left, and though the last thing Mackenzie wanted was to keep living in the place they’d bought and shared together as their first home, she had taken Reilly up on the offer anyway, rationalizing that at least she wouldn’t come out of what she had thought was her forever relationship empty handed.

It had been a mistake.

When she was in the apartment, a knot hardened in her stomach and brought with it a consistently nauseated feeling that wouldn’t dissipate even with all the time in the world. She couldn’t look at the furniture, or the wall of bookcases Reilly had built from scratch, or the king-size bed, without thinking about Reilly and how she’d left. Too frequently, the memories grew a hand that reached into her chest, gripped her heart, and squeezed—violently. Because, though Mackenzie tried to never think about how quickly Reilly had moved on, it had become more obvious as the months went by that Reilly had checked out of their relationship and into her new one long before the end. The sexless last eight months. The nights Reilly stayed late at the office, apparently working. The weekends Mackenzie had spent alone because Reilly had a “work trip.”

Mackenzie was a sucker. Her own situation mirrored every classic infidelity case that came across her desk, and she always worked especially hard on those cases because it was so glaringly obvious to an outsider what had been going on. The heat of embarrassment rose into her chest and neck and cheeks anytime the question crossed her mind: How could a very fucking good divorce lawyer who dealt with this shit literally every day not notice when her own wife had started a relationship with someone else? Then the next question would follow with a cold wave of inadequacy so strong she would need to sit down: How had she allowed Reilly to walk away without Mackenzie employing her considerable professional experience to stand up for what she wanted?

So when she’d arrived home on Friday, raw from watching her client quietly and patiently manipulate her ex-wife in the same way Reilly had done to her, she’d checked her inbox to find the woefully inequitable offer Anna wanted to put to Matilda and the fury—for herself and her own situation, and for Matilda—hit her in the chest like a fucking freight train. Her blood ran hot, and she needed to sit and breathe for a minute, like her therapist had taught her to do in these situations, simply to be able to think clearly about how she would put aside her disgust in favor of doing her job.

The part that sent Mackenzie to the moon, though, was that Anna had preempted Mackenzie’s initial response to the offer and included the word nonnegotiable in the email.

Anna had been at this a long time—for the two years this dissolution of a marriage had been proceeding. Based on Mackenzie’s review of the file, Anna knew all the tricks, and Mackenzie’s colleagues had not only facilitated her using the tricks but had encouraged it. The game was to make an offer just credible enough you look like you are making a good faith effort to resolve the matter, but don’t make it so good the other party might accept. And if the other party makes an offer, be ready with an arsenal of reasons stemming from exaggerated factual circumstances why the offer is entirely inequitable, even if—without any manipulation of the facts—the offer is a good, equitable one.

So when Mackenzie read the email, she took deep breaths in for three, out for six. When her brain quieted and she was able to think, she sighed heavily and closed her eyes for a moment, imagining how it would feel to fire this client. She couldn’t, though. She needed to see this one through and finally win that partnership spot. She was confident she could resolve it—it wasn’t any harder than matters she’d won before. Not really. And anyway, they weren’t at the point of firing the client yet. The behavior wasn’t bad enough to warrant it. So she had to put the offer to Elliott and Matilda, because Anna had played the game just right.

After she’d sent it via email to Elliott, she’d sat, her stomach churning. She needed to talk to someone—anyone. She texted Frankie, but she didn’t expect a response from her on a Friday night. Frankie referred to Friday as “Fuckday” and would habitually frequent the queer clubs in search of the next beautiful person to add as a notch on her bedpost. Mackenzie’s mother was—well, her feelings about her mother were akin to Christmas lights shoved unceremoniously into a cardboard box—utterly frustrating to attempt to untangle, and accordingly, she wasn’t anyone Mackenzie wanted to speak to on a good day, so she knew she wouldn’t be raising this situation with her at their dinner. She didn’t have anyone else, and the most pleasant conversation she’d had with anyone other than Frankie in the last few months had been with Elliott. For a blink, Mackenzie lamented how pathetic that was—a stranger in the airport who had become her staunchest opposition being the most pleasant person she’d spoken to in recent times.

Rather than dwelling on that particular failing and refusing to acknowledge the thought her brain threw at her, that she’d lost her damn mind, she’d called Elliott’s office. It was after 5 p.m. on a Friday, but someone—Hannah, who introduced herself as Elliott’s PA—answered the phone. Then, like it wasn’t even her, Mackenzie heard herself ask for Elliott’s mobile phone number. When Hannah asked her why she needed it, Mackenzie’s stone-cold lawyer persona failed her, and she stuttered and stumbled and finally choked out that she needed to discuss her client’s offer with Elliott urgently.

Hannah had paused—for longer than Mackenzie thought was necessary—before she read out the number and bade Mackenzie good night. There was something in her tone that Mackenzie couldn’t identify, but she hung up the phone without another word, her face hot and her hands shaking.

Then, telling herself Elliott’s number was essential, she’d texted Elliott about the offer before throwing her phone down on the bed like it was about to self-destruct. As she stood in the shower afterward, water cascading down her hair and over her shoulders, she’d swallowed the initial wave of hot embarrassment that had started rising the second she’d hit send and had turned her attention to the tightening clench in her chest that often accompanied thoughts of exactly how she was going to sit through yet another meal with her mother.

Now it was Monday, and as Mackenzie brought her phone closer to her face and checked her messages, she saw that Elliott hadn’t responded. Which was good, she told herself. She’d had the presence of mind over the weekend to schedule an emergency call with her therapist after the train wreck of a dinner with her mother, and they’d touched on her attraction to Elliott. Attraction was biological, her therapist had said. How you act on the attraction is what’s important.

She had decided, among all the moping, that around Elliott she would act friendly and professional. Because that was what was going to let her keep a clear head and get this case finished. She sighed, let the arm holding her phone flop back onto the bed, and stared at the bug she’d squashed weeks ago on the ceiling.

Her resolution notwithstanding, she couldn’t stop the way her traitorous heart leapt with the vibration of her phone in her hand. She lurched to sitting in bed, staring at the screen. A kind of relief ran through her at the sight of Frankie’s name.

Frankie 8:03AM

Good morning my beautiful butterfly!

Mackenzie 8:05AM

You’re in a good mood. Have you only just surfaced after your Friday on the town?