Page 9 of The Suit

He’s the only person to this day who has ever stolen my focus. I didn’t like it.

Then two things happened that changed everything.

Cindy found out she’d got pregnant in some stupid farewell to the summer bonfire beach party in her hometown and dropped out that day – actuallydropped outof Harvard Law – to raise it and be a stay-at-home mom, or something that would have had RBG turning in her grave.

I was still getting over the shock of the news as I headed to the Langdell Hall Library in the evening, only to findhimthere reading the bookIwanted. His head was down, the fingers on his left hand moving rapidly across the page while he wrote notes on a pad with his right. I studied him for a couple of minutes before I turned with a frown, leaving empty handed. He was there again the next night, again with the book I wanted. Just like Groundhog Day, it was repeated on the third, fourth, and fifth night.

I spent my first week going to bed more irritated than I’d been the day before, and by the end of it, I finally realized what I’d been witnessing.

Raferty Lathamwasstudying like I did. Raferty Lathamwasputting in the hours I did. Raferty Lathamwascaring like I did. And it wasthenthat I realized my mistake.

I’d massively underestimated him.

I hadn’t slept that night, or the night after that, or the night after that.

I spent another four days observing him during classes. He argued concisely and well, delivering clear and thought through debates. He had a natural ability and effortless charm. He’d been born into his name and had a lifetime of preparing for a career in the law. I was nothing but a girl from Beulah, Mississippi, named after the town she’d been born in because the woman who’d birthed her couldn’t be bothered to give her an actual name.

I found myself consumed by a level of jealousy that stole my breath and shook me to my marrow. It wasn’t his background; I couldn’t compete there. Our backgrounds weren’t even in the same reality.

I was jealous of his talent. I hated that he might be better than me –might- so I tasked myself to find out in a way that was on the opposite end of the spectrum from friendly, because I was at least smart enough to know that the only form of competition which really got results was straight up rivalry.

For weeks I argued against everything he said, pushed his buttons, and found that the more time I spent with him, the more I realized I’d never met anyone like him. He was the most irritating, smug individual I’d ever known.

Hating him turned out to be much easier.

Then after our Criminal Justice class where I’d tried to trip him up about his stance on Mandatory Minimums, he hated me right back.

It became open warfare, and Raferty Latham became my opponent.

My adversary.

My nemesis.

And I was the lawyer I was today because of him.

The pang in my chest intensified, bringing me back to the present, and I gulped down the sob that was making my face wet from more than the shower. The martini had dulled my ability to block out what I didn’t want to think about, and I only had one person to blame for it.

FuckingRafe Latham.

The bedside clock turned midnight by the time my head hit the pillow, having cleared my emails and taken two more calls with the team in Chicago. I’d get a solid five hours before I needed to get up and hit the gym to prep for an intense day ahead.

I hadn’t expected this divorce to go easy, especially as we were offering such a low amount, but as I drifted to sleep, there was a fire in my belly I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Latham and I might have an almost even record, but I knew he had the edge on our arguments. I knew because it was carved into my soul.

And I was fully prepared to claw it back. This was one he would not win.

* * *

“Duke...”

“Holmes...” he interrupted, clearly annoyed at his four a.m. wake up, which I couldn’t give a shit about. “I’ve told you. It’s fucking airtight. We restructured the company years ago, and twenty months ago, we…”

“It had better be airtight, because if it’s not, Rafe Latham will be the mold which gets in and infests us. And by us, I mean me. And you,” I added as an afterthought. “Duke, Maynard’s personal wealth is valued at twenty million, which even I want to call bullshit on, and I’ve seen the disclosures. The wife wants seven hundred and fifty million, so I’m telling you, if his finances aren’t tighter than your asshole, then we’re going to have a problem.”

“…As I was saying, twenty months ago the CUT set up a second series of shell companies in several locations around the Caribbean and Europe. You might have only just had this divorce dropped on you, but we’ve known about it for a long time. We needed time to set it up, and bed it in. Therefore, Beulah, when I say it’s airtight, it’s fucking airtight. No one knows about them except him and us.”

The ‘Cover-Up Team’, or CUT as we called them internally, was a division within the company which did exactly what it sounded like, and covered its tracks well. It was a service we offered our elite clients, those with funds over a hundred million, and was very popular with clients planning to divorce, among other reasons I wasn’t fully clued into due to its need-to-know basis. They technically weren’t part of the firm as it technically wasn’t legal - or legal at all - but the gentlemen offered our CUT divorce packages were more scared of their wives than they were the FBI.

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