Page 5 of The Note

Have you guys done the bee already?

Nope. We were saving it for you.

Yay. Let’s work on it while I’m on the ferry.

May responded with a thumbs-up and hit enter.

“Prosecco by the pool time?” Lauren asked.

As May slid open the back door to the deck, a thought suddenly came to her. “Do you think Arianna with all the refrigerator-note rules has cameras all over this house?”

Lauren laughed and shook her head. “Sometimes your brain terrifies me, May. You and that creepy imagination of yours really should write a book someday.”

*

The first sign of Kelsey’s arrival was a voice calling from inside the house. “Stash away the strap-on and get yourselves decent. I’m here!”

Lauren and May popped up from their chaise longues and headed for the kitchen, where they found Kelsey with a roller bag and an oversized straw tote embroidered with the wordsbeach please. She wore slouchy denim overalls paired with a black tank top.

Lauren threw her arms around Kelsey. “You made it!”

When Lauren let go of Kelsey, it was May’s turn. Kelsey pulled her into a tight hug, rocking back and forth. The feeling was instantly familiar: Whatever nervousness May had been feeling about seeing Kelsey after so long melted on contact. Kelsey’s hugs always had that calming effect.

May remembered the first time they met. She was twelve years old and new to the camp, having landed a scholarship on her second try, but it was already Kelsey’s third summer at Wildwood, and they were assigned as bunkmates.Can I hug you? I feel like I already know you from your camp profile.May was initially suspect, thinking no one could possibly be that eager to know her, but within a few weeks it became clear that once Kelsey Ellis decided she was your friend, she really meant it.

“You must be exhausted from the drive,” May said.

“Friday afternoon in the Hamptons. Rookie error. I should have left Boston earlier. One of our flagship tenants in Downtown Crossing ispulling some shit with their lease renewal. They would never try a stunt like this with my father, so I’m determined to handle it myself. But—” She forced a smile and took a deep breath. “That is all totally whatever, and I’m just so happy we’re finally all here.”

Kelsey dropped her car keys on the kitchen island next to the open prosecco bottle. “Oh, man, you started the fun without me.”

“Barely,” Lauren assured her.

“So that means only one orgy in the pool so far?”

Kelsey had a unique talent for saying the most inappropriate things in a way that managed never to be off-putting. The one time she had accompanied May to Bloomington for spring break, she asked May’s mother out of the blue while clearing the dinner dishes what had happened between her and May’s father. When May’s mother tried to sidestep the question by saying it was so long ago, Kelsey said something about smart women learning how to “take care of themselves” and then made a humming sound.

May was mortified at the obvious vibrator reference, but then Coral Hanover did something she rarely did. She laughed—loudly—like an actual, full-belly laugh. By the end of the night, May’s mother had taken out an old photo album and shared the story of meeting Mitchell Hanoverwhile she was getting her graduate degree at IU to become a teacher. How he had tried asking her out to dinner in Chinese, only to learn that her friend who had helped him study had taught him instead to say, “I am not very good at this.” How surprised she was to find herself in a relationship with an American from a small Midwestern town. How businesslike he was when she told him she was pregnant, immediately asking how far along she was to make sure it wasn’t too late to go to a clinic.

May’s father, her mother explained, had been excited to meet someone as “exotic” as her mother, but confessed that he could not imagine himself making a lifetime commitment to a woman who “wasn’t from here.” May knew the rest of the story. Her mother promised to raise the child alone as long as he married her long enough for her to obtain citizenship before they divorced. But until that night, May never realized the full extent of the mean-spiritedness beneath her father’s rejection of both May and her mother. It’s almost as if May’s mother needed Kelsey in the room as a buffer to tell the whole story.

Kelsey was looking at May now and smiling. “God, I can’t believe how long it’s been since I’ve actually seen you in person. I mean, it must have been at the wedding?”

No, it wasn’t the wedding. May rememberedexactly when it was—eight years ago, not long before May left the law firm for the DA’s Office. She remembered because that was the beginning of the story of how she and Kelsey had stopped being friends.

4

May was excited to be traveling for depositions without a supervising partner, even more so because the work was in Boston, which meant she could meet up with Kelsey. When they were in college, they’d seen each other regularly. Harvard and Boston College were only five miles apart. But it had been seven years since they’d graduated, which meant seven years of living in separate cities. Even when May was in law school, she and Kelsey had found time to hop on Amtrak to visit each other several times a year, but they were both so busy now.

They met at a heralded steakhouse Kelseyselected, one that May never could have afforded if she didn’t have an expense account at the law firm for “potential client engagement.” At the time, May was single, focused on her career. She needed the firm salary to pay off her loans, but no matter how many hours she billed, the clock toward partnership consideration was the one ticking most loudly in her head.

The day before her flight to Boston, she’d had her annual review with the head of the litigation department and the two cochairs of the junior associate mentorship committee. The good news was that her reviewing partners described her as “smart,” “hardworking,” “a grinder.” Her billable hours put her among the top ten percent of associates by that measure. But the bad news was bad. She needed to “lean in.” “Be heard more.” “Show that you can lead a team and be more than a supporting player.” “Demonstrate potential to bring new business into the firm.” When they tried to soften the blow by saying how “agreeable” and “amenable” everyone found her to work with, she pictured herself calmly rising from her chair, throwing it across the conference table, and then walking out the door as they stared at her in shock. Instead, she nodded, smiled politely, and thanked them all for their candid and helpful feedback, promising that she would take it to heart.

The message was clear. Unless May either got a personality transplant or managed to changethe elusive metrics large law firms used to measure “partnership material,” no number of billable hours could save her from the inevitable day a year or two from now when she would be not-so-subtly encouraged to “look for opportunities beyond the firm.” To avoid the humiliation, she had spent the entire night researching legal jobs that came with student loan relief.

All of this was weighing on May as she and Kelsey played catch-up over their matching meals of martinis, shrimp cocktails, and rare rib eyes. Not wanting to be a Debbie Downer, she told Kelsey that her hard work at the firm was paying off and that she was now entrusted to deal with some of the clients directly. In fact, she was enjoying her independence so much that she was considering leaving Big Law culture behind for a job that would allow her to handle her own cases. Maybe the District Attorney’s Office, since she had always been so fascinated by crime. She might even have time to get a dog. She managed to make it seem like it was everything she had always wanted.

Meanwhile, Kelsey appeared to have jumped into her role as the third generation of the Ellis real estate empire, going on at length about a pending closing she was handling for a thirty-two-story office building in the Back Bay district and a “sexy” renovation of an old movie theater that she was planning to transform intoa cinema-slash-speakeasy—no mention of her father’s reputedly questionable lending arrangements and deals that seemed to breeze through the usually cumbersome Boston regulatory process, concerns that used to eat away at a younger Kelsey.

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