Page 97 of The Suit

Sabrina:FSJ has sent some papers over for you to sign, they’re on your desk.

Holmes:Rafe, I’m going to fix this. I promise.

A cold sweat broke out across my skin, starting at the back of my neck before spreading like a rash until my shirt was sticking to me. That last message had been sent ten minutes ago. Visions of shouting at her terror-stricken face flashed in front of my eyes, as visceral as the pain searing my chest. The tears pouring down her cheeks as I wrenched her head back were doing nothing to help it either.

Those tears. Those fucking tears. They were simply another one of her games but served only to plaster up the newly formed cracks in my heart with cheap spackle. I’d have been better off if she’d stood there with a bigFuck You, I Win,sign.

I knew what to do with that, I was familiar with that.

But those tears? They were tears of a guilty person who’d been caught red-handed. Tears I wanted nothing to do with. Just like I wanted nothing to do with her apologies, her explanations.

Her.

The sooner she was out of New York the better, and until then, I was staying as far away from her as humanly possible.

I scrolled through my texts again, picking out the one from Sabrina.

Rafe:Can you pull the Maynard case and hand it over to Rico Moretti? Tell him to get familiar with it because he’s taking it on from today. Thanks.

I looked up to see that Penn had finally managed to get off the floor.

“It’s ten fifteen.” I glanced down at my phone again. “Also, what did you do last night?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Your texts. What did you quit?”

He nearly toppled off balance again from the speed at which he snatched up his phone from the coffee table, before his face whitened so quick I thought he might pass out, or vomit - which had me gagging.

I squeezed my eyes tight. “Please don’t puke, I can’t cope with that right now.”

He looked up at me, his face filled with horror before glancing back at his screen.

“What did you do?”

His hand was still covering his mouth while he read, but he didn’t reply, which meant it must be really serious.

“Pennington, what did you do?”

“It appears that I emailed my grandfather and Nancy, and called them both snakes.” He finally looked back up at me. “Then I announced I was quitting the firm.”

If he wasn’t so ashen I might have laughed, because fuuccckk. Penn did some stupid shit sometimes, but that was a line he would never cross. He mostly rebelled within the boundaries he’d set himself; nothing illegal, but just enough to keep things interesting. See whose buttons he could push, more for his own amusement than anyone else’s. It was hard being a genius sometimes.

“Did they reply?”

“No, but Dylan and Lauren both did.”

My eyebrows hit my hairline. “You copied them in?”

He nodded, slowly. “Yeah, all of them. Nancy, Dylan, Saffron and Lauren, plus Grandpa and my mom.”

“What did they say?”

“Dylan called me a dickhead, and Lauren sent seven…” he counted them out, “laughing/crying emojis, and said Gramps was going to kill me.”

He passed me his phone and fell on to the couch next to me with a groan. I scanned over his email, which really was as bad as he said. Short, to the point, and probably wouldn’t have helped matters that he signed itNo longer your bitch, Pennington Cabot James Shepherd.

“Wow, you used your full name.” I placed his phone in his open palm. “At least that way they’ll have known you were really serious.”

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