Doubt (Caroline Auden #1) - C. E. Tobisman Page 0,3
percent of female associates survived to become partners and that unless they had a strong mentor at their law firms, their chances were closer to zero.
Doubts circled like flies attracted to the stench of self-pity. Why had she left the tech world? Mother’s milk and coding. She’d been raised on both. But the latter had never really sustained her, she reminded herself. Even worse, tech brought out aspects of her personality that were . . . problematic. She had good reasons for becoming a lawyer. She just needed to learn her new trade. At warp speed if possible.
Caroline’s phone lit up with an incoming page.
Her assistant’s voice crackled onto the line.
“Louis wants to see you,” said Silvia.
“Please tell him I’ll be right there,” Caroline said.
Louis Stern. The man she’d come to work with and the smartest person in the firm.
She took a deep breath and brushed her hands down her suit.
It was game time.
Caroline stood at the threshold of Louis’s office. If practicing law was like learning tennis, her first lesson wouldn’t be with the kindly old instructor at the local park. No, she’d signed up to learn from the King of Clay, Rafael Nadal. She waited, gripping her racket, preparing for him to serve at 150 miles per hour.
She tapped on the open door to announce her presence.
Louis Stern looked up from the papers on his desk.
“Ah, Ms. Auden. Welcome. I do hope Silvia’s taking good care of you.” He raised his white eyebrows above the top curves of his wire-rimmed glasses, creating the impression of two fuzzy caterpillars resting atop them.
“She is,” Caroline answered, matching her boss’s breezy tone. She was glad her voice betrayed none of her nerves.
“Thanks for sharing her with me,” she added. Louis’s decision to assign his assistant to her desk was either a mark of favoritism or a way to keep an eye on her. Or both.
“Silvia’s quite good. She knows all about computers and whatnot.” The white-haired partner waved a hand around, vaguely encompassing his own computer, which remained asleep, its monitor a black mirror reflecting the deepening light of the day.
Caroline suppressed a smile. Louis’s distaste for technology was legendary. Not only was his computer dark, so was the office lighting system. The only illumination came from an antique floor lamp, its green shade casting a glow on pictures of Massachusetts in the 1800s.
Louis himself evoked a bygone era. In his glen-checked bow tie and herringbone blazer, he looked like he’d stepped out of one of the pictures on his wall. He wore a gold ring on his right hand, adorned with the pig’s head crest of Harvard’s elite, old-money Porcellian Club.
“Have a seat.” Louis gestured to the guest chair positioned in front of his heavy walnut desk.
Sitting down, Caroline clasped her hands in her lap. Her fingers itched for her laptop, but Silvia had warned her that Louis “found it distasteful” to look over a screen to speak to someone.
“Where’s your legal pad?” Louis asked.
Caroline just grimaced and shook her head.
“Always bring paper and a pen to meetings.” Louis offered her a Montblanc from his penholder, then handed her a yellow-lined legal pad from the top drawer of his desk. “It signals you’ve come for more than just idle conversation.”
Louis spoke with the broad As and clipped endings of the eastern elite, a species rarely seen west of the Mississippi. Caroline knew his story. He’d moved to Los Angeles fifteen years earlier when Thompson Hale had offered him the helm of his respected firm. Since then, Louis had regularly topped the legal papers’ lists of bet-the-company litigators. Meanwhile, Thompson had taken emeritus status, collecting a share of the firm’s profits while practicing his golf game.
Now Caroline waited for Louis to make the next move. These early salvos of this first conversation were important. Even though Louis knew her from class, he’d no longer be comparing her to other law students. He’d be comparing her to the talented attorneys at his firm. Although his offer of employment was a vote of confidence, she still needed to earn a spot in their ranks. Even these early niceties were a way of probing her worth. So far, she’d done nothing to impress him.
She silently vowed to do better.
“Now that we’ve finished the idle-conversation part of our meeting,” Louis said, a hint of amusement playing across his patrician features, “I’d like to give you your first assignment.”