Page 2 of Because of You
Ihammer the final nail into the wall hook, the banging echoing in the large office, empty except for a black spinning chair and a glass desk covered by a vast assortment of beverages. I hang my diploma on the hook and step back to admire my handiwork like the professional I absolutely am. Then I collapse into the chair and spin in a circle like the chaotic human I spend a great deal of my life pretending I absolutely am not. I shove that thought away as quickly as it comes. I don’t need an extra existential crisis this morning.
Today is the day we move into our office. The most perfect office on a shady Pittsburgh street with enormous windows and crown moldings and slightly creaky steps and gorgeous built-in bookshelves. The office that will house the all-female private client law firm that my friends Julie, Emma, Molly, and I have been dreaming about starting since we were first year law students buried under ten-pound textbooks and a paralyzing fear of the Socratic method. The law firm we are finally making a reality after paying our dues for five years at big international law firms housed in downtown high rises. We’ve been in the serious planning stage for more than a year—from the minutewe finished our fourth year as associates. And it is all finally happening.
Today. Our name on the deed and my diploma on the wall is proof.
This is ours.
There is only one tiny problem. I’m not one hundred percent sure I want it to be mine.
That thought has been percolating in the back of my mind for the entire year we have been planning in earnest, leaving me feeling guilty and disloyal for even considering abandoning our four-way dream. I have told exactly no one about my doubts.
I keep hoping that as we get closer, they will disappear. The anticipation being worse than the actual event and all that. But instead, the opposite is happening. The closer we get to realizing our dream, the worse it gets.
And today, the day after we closed on the townhouse that would house our firm, and six months before we officially open for business, I am vibrating with anxiety. I absolutely don’t know how to say the words, “I don’t know if I want this, but I don’t know why,” to my friends. Conflict is not something I am comfortable with. I usually just go with the flow if that is what makes people around me happy, even if it doesn’t necessarily make me happy. Let no one say I’m not self-aware, even if that awareness isn’t exactly doing me any good right now.
“Getting an early start, huh?” comes a voice from the doorway.
I gasp, yanked out of my internal monologue. I spin towards my office door where one of my best friends and newly appointed law partner Julie Parker stands. She is balancing a tote bag the size of Texas, a large pink bakery box, and a tray of to-go coffee cups. She’s wearing cutoffs, an old college t-shirt, and flip flops; her long blonde hair is pulled up on top of her head to combat the July heat. How she can still look completelyperfect despite the casual clothes, messy hair, and swampy summer morning is a mystery I have been pondering for the entirety of our friendship.
Julie and I have known each other our whole lives. My parents started dating their freshman year of college. When they met Julie’s parents, who had also recently started dating, they all hit it off immediately and have been friends ever since. Both couples got married a few years after college and then settled in the same Pittsburgh neighborhood. Julie, her twin brother Ben, and I have been best friends since before we could walk. Our families spend a lot of time together, including a two-week vacation every August at the Parkers’ lake house in Western Maryland.
Julie and I went to different colleges, but we came back together for law school, and then we both ended up practicing in the private client groups of big law firms. Both of our practices focused on high-net-worth estate planning, which will be the focus of our law firm.
“You scared the shit out of me, Jules. That box better have donuts in it,” I say, while standing and reaching for it. If I’m going to have all the Very Big Feelings, I might as well cover them in sugar. Because I am a mature adult who deals with her feelings in a very mature adult way.
“There’s nothing in there for you,” she says, holding the box out of reach while setting the coffee tray on my desk. “I have your gross maple donuts in a separate bag in my purse, so they don’t infect the real donuts. You know, the ones normal people eat. Like chocolate.” She reaches into her tote and hands it to me. I immediately tear into it.
“And I’m not surprised you didn’t hear me walking up the stairs, what with all the banging. What are you even doing here this early? It’s barely eight.”
“Couldn’t sleep, too excited,” I mumble, my mouth full of maple cream. In fact, I couldn’t sleep because of the anxiety and relentless doubt of it all. But I can’t—won’t—say that to Julie. She has planned our four-way exit from big law, and the start of our new practice, with a strategic precision that would make even the most decorated military general proud. She tends to micromanage people under the best of circumstances and is steadfast in her decision making. I swear she has never had a single regret in all her life. Any expression of doubt would have her reciting a litany of reasons as to why this is the right move for me. And how we have been planning for years, so of course I want this.
That’s the last thing I need.
“I’d say take your coffee,” she says, pointing at the take-out tray. “But I see your drink lineup is already in full swing this morning.” She gestures to the assortment of cups on my desk.
My emotional support beverages have been a running joke for as long as I can remember. I have a massive tumbler of water, a cup of coffee, and a can of seltzer within reach at all times. This is a source of great amusement for the people in my life. But joke’s on them, really, because I am always hydrated and appropriately caffeinated.
“Always room for one more.” I lift the cup marked with an H and take a sip. I close my eyes as the latte hits my taste buds.Good choice, Jules. My night of broken sleep and extra early wakeup are starting to catch up with me, but I shove it down. There is too much to do and too many feelings to avoid. As I savor the extra hit of caffeine, Julie sits down on the floor and immediately pulls a laptop out of her bag. She opens it to display a complex, color-coded spreadsheet on the screen that I know contains the entire universe of things we need to do, buy, and prepare before we officially open for business in January.
“Jesus, Jules, isn’t it a little early for that?” I slide down to the floor next to her as I watch her assume the very serious person doing very serious workface I have become intimately familiar with over our lifelong friendship. “We don’t even have pens. Or phones. Or, like, toilet paper.”
“Yes, we do!” calls a voice from the bottom of the stairs. Thirty seconds later, the other half of our foursome appears in the doorway. Emma walks in with a shopping bag in hand full of what looks like pens, notebooks, and the aforementioned toilet paper. She is wearing black shorts and a plain white t-shirt. Her red hair is pulled up in a high ponytail, and her sunglasses slide down her nose. Molly swings in, all bouncing brown curls, cloud of perfume, and sundress in a riot of color. She has stacks of bracelets on both wrists, sundry bags hanging off her arms, and a bottle of Dom in her hand.
“Happy first day, partners,” Molly crows, swinging the bottle overhead. She puts the champagne on the floor and digs through one of her bags, emerging with a handful of neon plastic champagne flutes. Molly rarely does anything that isn’t at top volume and in full color. She lives life way, way out loud in a way that is equal parts fascinating and mystifying, especially considering her career path. She specializes in the most complex, high-net-worth estate planning that attorneys can do. She is brilliant, detailed, methodical, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the intricacies of federal transfer tax law that is enviable and absolutely incongruous with her outgoing personality and artist’s soul. In short, she is my most fascinating friend. She immediately starts handing the flutes around as she flops down next to Julie and grabs the chocolatiest donut she can find in the box.
“Jules, it is way too fucking early for a spreadsheet that big. Em, put down your doomsday-prepper supply bag and get down here.”
Emma does what she is told, sliding her sunglasses on top of her head, rolling her eyes, and poking through the donut box. When Molly issues an order, people tend to comply. Molly opens the champagne bottle with a loud pop and pours the wine into all our flutes.
“To us,” she says, with a brilliant smile on her face. “Best friends and badass women. Who would have guessed back in our first year of law school when we talked about one day opening our own firm while we were bored to tears in that contracts class it would actually happen?”
“Duh, I knew,” Julie snarks.
“Yeah, yeah, manifest your shit, blah, blah, blah,” I mutter.
What Julie wants, she tends to find a way to get. In all the years I have known her, she has never made a plan—for herself or for anyone else—that she has not followed through to perfect completion. If I didn’t love her so much, I would probably have killed her years ago.
“I mean, I kind of knew?” says Emma, her voice rising slightly at the end as if asking a question. “There’s no way I was going to survive in a big firm for the long term. All the talking and networking and politicking and up or out? No freaking way.” Emma, the youngest of our group, is an actual genius who went to college at sixteen. It was socially traumatic for a girl who already hadn’t had the easiest life up to that point. She is an introvert in the extreme, avoids social situations like the plague, and when around anyone except for the three of us or one of her clients, rarely speaks unless absolutely necessary. She is our calm, our voice of reason, and the referee when Julie and Molly get into it, which is often.
