The Devil in a Tailored Suit
The forty-first floor of the Sterling Building emptied out around nine, leaving Julia Hart alone with the hum of fluorescent lights and the accusing blink of her cursor. The Ferris settlement sat open on her screen, a wound she kept pressing to see if it still hurt. It did. Six months of work, three depositions, a paralegal who'd cried in the copy room, and in the end her client had taken sixty cents on the dollar because the other side's lawyers had buried them in paper until the money ran out. That was the trick of it, she thought. You didn't have to win. You just had to make losing too expensive for the other person to bear.
She rubbed her eyes and looked out at the city, a smear of gold and white stretching toward the river, and told herself this was why she'd gone into corporate litigation instead of something that let her sleep at night. The mortgage on her studio apartment didn't care about her conscience. Neither did her student loans.
The knock on the frosted glass of her office door came so softly she almost mistook it for the building settling.
"We're closed," she called out, not looking up. "Try the vending machine on three. It's more reliable than most of the…
