Page 43 of The Better Sister

I said nothing, wondering if he would tell me more. Real couples talked about real problems.

“It’s about that client at the firm, Gentry.”

That single word felt like a jolt of electricity up my spine. I hadn’t thought about the company for months.

“See? That’s why I hadn’t mentioned it to you. It’s a reminder of Adam.”

I assured him it was okay and that I wanted him to tell me.

“The federal government’s investigating them. A couple of employees—middle management, but high enough—got separate counsel, which means they’re probably cutting deals with the US Attorney’s Office. The hammer could drop any day with indictments of the CEO and CFO, if not the entire corporation.”

“So why the bad dream? Adam had clients get investigated and charged all the time.”

“But he was a criminal defense attorney, and I’m not.” His index finger was tracing an invisible circle on my shoulder, a distraction as he talked to his dead law partner’s widow in bed. “And we weren’t working for Gentry on a criminal matter. It was strictly M&A.”

Mergers and acquisitions. I remember telling Adam that he should have been happy about doing noncriminal, transactional work for once. After all, he had been the one complaining about being on the wrong side of the courtroom as a white-collar criminal defense attorney.

“So why is the government investigating?”

“Gentry was doing a lot of foreign deals. Sometimes the players in other countries have expectations that the United States government has a problem with.”

“Like, what kind of expectations?”

“Paying off every person up and down the line. Some people brush it under the scope of ‘cultural due diligence,’ but the feds call it bribery. One of the reasons Gentry hired us was to help them get the deal closed without crossing any lines into corruption. R&B’s got a ninety-eight percent satisfaction rate two years after closing of international M&As.”

“And you do that by helping them walk all the way up to the line?”

“Hm-mm.” His finger had stopped its rhythmic tracing. He had fallen back to sleep, just like that.

I tried to do the same, counting my breaths and timing them with his. It didn’t work.

I crawled out of bed, pulled on my T-shirt and underwear, and made my way to his kitchen. One of the many things I liked about Jake was that he had good taste. Both his apartment in the city and house in East Hampton were clean and modern, with a masculine touch, a mix of neutral colors and surprising textures. As I sat on a steel barstool and opened my laptop on his butcher countertop, I could picture myself hosting a dinner party here.

I pulled up the map page I had bookmarked on my laptop. It was the area surrounding the spot in Queens where Adam had been dropped off and picked up the last two days of his life. I had already googled every individual street address within a mile walk of the train station he had used as his Uber location, and had still not figured out where Adam had spent those hours. I had even driven there a few times, walking around with his picture, not knowing who I might show it to.

If the police had ever tried to nail down this part of the story about the ending of Adam’s life, they had never told me. My guess is that once they focused on Ethan, they stopped tracking down any leads that weren’t on the road to convicting my son.

But now Jake’s bad dream about the pending criminal investigation of Gentry had me thinking again about what I’d written off as a dead end.

I googled “FBI Kew Gardens” and knew immediately that I was right. Up popped a map with a red icon directly across from the train station. In addition to the map, I saw a photograph of the cube-shaped black glass office building I had personally walked into. It was home to a Duane Reade and a 24 Hour Fitness on the ground level, but there had been no way for me to know what was housed on the other eleven stories. When I googled the address, I had found a radiology practice, a leasing office, and a medical group.

But now I knew what to look for. There, on the website for the FBI’s New York operations, was what I’d been searching for all along: “Along with our main office in Manhattan, we have five satellite offices, known as resident agencies, in the area.” The Queens office was on Kew Gardens Road.

If midlevel company employees had been providing information to the government, maybe Gentry’s outside counsel had done the same—especially if that lawyer was a former federal prosecutor who was angry that his wife had pressured him to sell out by defending the types of people he used to put in prison. I thought about the unreturned email message I had sent to Carol and Roger Mercer, the Gentry Group’s in-house lawyer. I had written it off as a sign that they were either busy or had no information to provide, but now I wondered if my question about Adam’s nonexistent meeting with Gentry had struck a nerve.

I heard the slapping sound of bare feet against tile behind me. “You look good half naked in my kitchen.”

I leaned my head back to accept a kiss.

“Is that your book?”

I was still on the masthead as the EIC ofEve, but I was on a leave of absence while Ethan’s trial was pending. In retrospect, I should have forced myself to maintain a schedule at the office. After all, Olivia kept reminding me that it was her job, not mine, to prepare his defense. With him in custody, there was nothing I could do other than visit him twice a week and try to give him hope that this was all temporary.

In the meantime, I had been trying to finish the memoir. The chapters about my career were done. Jake knew I had been struggling with the more personal sections. How could I sum up twenty years of feminist publishing without talking about the love I carried for the father who used to hit my mom when he drank too much, or the resentment I had for the mother who, in my view, had not done enough to protect herself or her daughters? And now that everyone knew the backstory to my marriage, I needed to write about my relationship with Nicky as well.

“I’m starting to think the advance wasn’t enough,” I joked. “Hey, that thing you said about Gentry being investigated? Take a look at this.”

I pushed my laptop over so he could see the map on the screen. “The FBI has an office in Queens, right next to that train station.” He knew I’d been trying to figure out where Adam had been those two days.

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