§1 — Hook
The pen my mother used to take to oral argument was a brushed-steel Cross with a courthouse stamp on the cap. She had carried it for fourteen years on the bench and another six in private practice before that, which is twenty years longer than the manufacturer warranties them, and it still wrote.
I had been carrying the pen for eighteen months. She had given it to me the morning she retired. She had not said take this. She had said this is the one I used, which is how my mother gives a thing.
I took it out of my inside coat pocket on the thirty-sixth floor of 200 Park, in the neutral conference room the senior partners had selected, six days after the kickoff. There were three witnesses and a notary. There was, on the table, a folder.
Sinclair was already in the room.
She was in a charcoal suit cut for cross. She had her notepad squared to the corner of the table. Her coffee was at one o'clock. She was not, as far as I could tell, going to look at me until the contract was open.
"Counselor," I said.
"Chen."
The notary asked us to confirm the names. We confirmed the names. The Carrington senior partner — older than my father if my father had a senior partner, which my father, who runs a hedge fund, does not — slid the folder to the middle of the table.
Section 2, paragraph B, on page four, was the cohabitation clause. I had read it twice. Sinclair had marked it up and unmarked it. Her copy had a line of pencil under shared address of record that had been erased. The erase mark was visible from across the table because Sinclair erases by pressing harder than she wrote.
I uncapped my mother's pen.
I signed first. The ink ran thin in the upstroke and bled a little where the nib paused — twenty years of paused upstrokes will do that to a pen — and the witnesses watched the way witnesses watch a signature in a contract that has, in the room with them, not yet been agreed to in any way except formally.
I slid the folder to Sinclair.
She did not pick up the pen. She had her own pen — a black gel pen, the kind of pen the kind of person who keeps a stack of parking-violation forms in her glovebox would use — and she signed with it. Her signature was not unlike the parking-violation form. Pressed hard. Crisp. The kind of signature that intends to be visible from the back of the room.
The notary stamped both copies.
"Mr. Chen," the Carrington senior partner said. "The dinner is at eight. Tomorrow night. The Liberty board chair will introduce you. You will not be expected to speak at length."
"Understood."
"Ms. Sinclair," the Holloway senior partner said. "Your driver will be at your apartment at six forty-five."
"I have a car," she said.
"Your driver will be at your apartment at six forty-five."
She did not answer.
The senior partners stood. The witnesses stood. The notary stamped a third copy, gathered her things, and left first, which is how notaries always leave.
Sinclair and I stood at the table.
I capped the pen. I put it back in the inside pocket of the charcoal coat. The parking-violation form, six days old, was still folded in there. I had not taken it out. I had not, in six days, decided whether to.
"Section 2, paragraph B," she said. "You marked it up."
"You marked it up first."
"Yes."
"Tomorrow," I said.
"Tomorrow."
She picked up her coffee. She left the room before I did, which is how Sinclair always leaves a room.
§2 — Build
The dinner was the kind of dinner the Liberty board chair throws when the Liberty board chair wants the press release in the morning paper to read a particular way.
I have been at six of these dinners. I have, at six of these dinners, said the same four sentences and consumed the same three glasses of the same pinot noir and not, after, remembered the meal. My father has been at sixty of them. My mother, before she retired from the bench, had stopped going.
The room was the upstairs at a Tribeca place that does the Liberty board's catering. Twelve people. The Liberty board chair, three board members, the senior partner from Holloway, the senior partner from Carrington, two of their wives, the Carrington junior I had not — six days ago in the kickoff — recognized, his date, and us.
Sinclair was wearing black. She was, between the doorway and the seat the Liberty board chair had assigned her, asked the same three questions by three different board members about how we had met. She gave the same answer to all three. Through mutual friends. In March. At a thing. She did not vary the wording. The third board member did not ask a fourth question.
The Liberty board chair stood. She gave the introduction. The introduction was the version we had cleared at four that afternoon, with two added words I had not seen before — delighted and partnership, both of which the Liberty board chair pronounced as if she had written them, which she had.
I stood. I said the four sentences. I did not extend.
Sinclair stood. She said three sentences. The third sentence was a thank-you to the Liberty board chair that the Liberty board chair, visibly, did not register as the dry thing it was.
She sat down.
The Holloway senior partner — Tom, who in my father's circles is Tommy, which is the name that would have ended my mother's tolerance for a dinner like this one inside ten minutes — clapped twice. The room clapped. The pinot noir was poured.
Under the table, Sinclair's hand was on the edge of the chair on her side. Not on mine. I could see it because the tablecloth was the kind that ends two inches above the lap.
She did not move it.
I did not, either.
The dinner ended at ten forty-two. The Liberty board chair embraced Sinclair at the elevator. Sinclair embraced back. The press photo had been taken at the table, but the press photo the Liberty board chair was going to lead with was the one her assistant took, with a phone, of the elevator embrace. I knew this because I had watched the assistant take it.
Sinclair's driver had been told to wait downstairs.
Sinclair's car had been towed.
She told me on the sidewalk, in the kind of voice she uses when she is filing a thing.
"They towed your car."
"They towed my car. The valet here works for the Liberty board chair's husband. The valet at the Park-Avenue side of the venue was in the wrong slot. I parked in the loading bay."
"Why."
"Because the valet at the Park-Avenue side was in the wrong slot."
"Sinclair."
"It is fine. The towing-recovery lot opens at six in the morning. I will get a cab home."
"To Brooklyn."
"To Brooklyn."
"Your driver is at your apartment at six forty-five."
"Yes."
"Sinclair," I said. "Section 2, paragraph B."
She looked at me.
"Press window opens at midnight," I said. "Your address of record, as of midnight, is Tribeca. Your driver, at six forty-five, picks you up at Tribeca."
"Yes," she said.
She did not look surprised. She had, in the contract she had signed at three that afternoon, not been surprised by section 2, paragraph B. She had been surprised by the sequencing.
She had, until ten forty-two on a Tuesday, expected the cohabitation clause to begin in the morning.
"My loft is in Tribeca," I said.
"Yes."
"The cab will take you to Brooklyn first."
"No," she said.
"No?"
"No. The cab is not going to take me to Brooklyn at eleven on a Tuesday and then back across the bridge at six. I am thirty. I am not romantic about anything I have signed in the last twelve hours. I will come to the loft."
"Right."
"On the record," she said. "The loft is your apartment. I am a guest in it. The press window is a press window."
"On the record."
She got in the cab. I got in the cab.
The cab driver did not, in the way cab drivers in this city do not, ask a single question.
§3 — Cliffhanger
The loft is on the eighth floor of a building on Greenwich. My mother bought the lease for me when I made associate, which was not — at the time — a thing I had asked her to do. I have, in the four years since, made the rent on it. The thing my mother bought was the address.
The cab let us out on the curb. Sinclair had a small overnight bag the Holloway senior partner's secretary had — without asking her — packed and sent over to the venue in the afternoon. She picked it up off the seat with the same hand she carries the parking-violation forms with.
The doorman recognized the bag before he recognized the woman. He held the door.
"Mr. Chen."
"Edgar."
"Ms. Sinclair," he said, reading the tag on the bag. "Welcome."
She looked at the tag. The tag had been put there by the Holloway senior partner's secretary — Ms. Sinclair, c/o Mr. Chen, Greenwich, 8B — and Sinclair had not, until the doorman read it, known the tag was there.
"Thank you," she said.
The elevator. Eight floors. I counted them out of habit. The way other people manage breath, I count floors.
I unlocked 8B. I let her go in first. I do not know why; the contract did not specify. I think I had — somewhere between the towing and the cab — decided that the version of this evening that did not start with my walking in ahead of her was the version I was going to live with.
She stepped into the entry.
The entry credenza is a piece of cherry the previous tenant had left and I had not, in four years, replaced. On it is a single photograph in a black frame — black-and-white, eight by ten, two-and-a-half decades old. A younger woman in a federal-bench robe. The robe is being put on her shoulders by a man whose face is cropped out of the image. The woman is not looking at the man. She is looking, with no expression at all, at the camera.
It is the only photograph on the credenza. It has been the only photograph on the credenza since I moved in. I have not, in four years, taken it down. I have, three times, considered it.
Sinclair stopped in the entry.
She did not put the bag down.
She read the photograph the way she had read the parking-violation form six days ago — twice, the second time slower than the first.
"That is Judge Chen," she said.
"Yes."
"Your mother."
"Yes."
She did not turn around. She did not, for what I counted as four seconds and then five and then six, do anything except look at the photograph.
"On the record," she said. "I have never met her."
"On the record."
"She read the bench in Sinclair v. Allied Holdings in 2022."
"Yes."
"She wrote the dissent."
"Yes."
"Of course she did."
I stood in the doorway behind her. The hallway light was on the timer; the timer was cycling out. The light dimmed the way the stairwell light at 200 Park dims — on a delay, then steadying.
"Sinclair."
"Yes."
"Do not ask me about her tonight."
I did not, the entire time I said it, raise my voice. I do not raise my voice. The flatter it gets, the more it costs me; and on a Tuesday night at eleven seventeen, in the entry of an apartment I had not wanted any guest in this week, with a woman whose dissent my mother had written and who had, in my building's lease records, just become my address of record, the cost was — for the first time in a while — measurable.
She did not turn around.
"On the record," she said. "I am not asking you tonight."
She put the bag down.
She did not, for the rest of the night that I could hear from the south guest room, ask.
She had not, when she stood in the entry with the bag still in her hand, known what she was going to do with the question by morning.
I had not, standing in the doorway behind her with my mother's pen still warm in the inside pocket of the charcoal coat, known either.
The hallway light cycled back on.
The framed photograph was, in the new light, the same photograph. The cropped man at the edge of the frame was, in the new light, still cropped.
"Goodnight, Sinclair."
"Goodnight, Chen."
She went down the hall.
I stood in the entry.
I did not, for the first time in four years, take the photograph off the credenza.
I did not, for the first time in four years, want to.
— to be continued in Ep3