Love Proof (Laws of Attraction) (26 page)

“Yeah, you did,” she said quietly.  Then she left him alone and headed
back toward the warmth.

***

Last time in the Salt Lake City airport, Sarah thought.  At least for
the foreseeable future—

Foreseeable future?  Don’t you always plan ten steps
ahead, Henley?

—but at least she could always find something to eat there:  Greek
salads, hold the feta; bean burros, chips and salsa at the Mexican grill; pasta
and marinara sauce at the Italian place; a rice and vegetable bowl at the
Chinese.

Tonight she bought a falafel and hummus wrap and carried it to the gate
to for the short layover.

Joe sat near one of the windows, eating a sandwich and working on his
laptop.  Chapman gobbled a double-decker burger while shoveling french fries
into his already full mouth.  Marcela picked at a salad with her plastic fork
and flipped through a magazine.

Sarah sat off by herself, in no more mood than any of them to interact
now that they were all off-duty.

She glanced over at Joe again, and found him looking at her.  Then he
pulled out his phone, and she waited for the inevitable text.

Which didn’t come.

She checked the bare screen a few times, then looked up at Joe again.

He smiled.

She narrowed her eyes at him.  And shook her head slightly to show she
didn’t understand.

He sent her a text that said,
E-mail.

Sarah refreshed the e-mail on her phone.

There were a few new e-mails from lawyers at Mickey’s office, responding
to a memorandum she had sent them earlier in the day.  She could read those
later.

What interested her more was the one from Joe.  He’d sent her a map.

It showed two different routes from LAX to addresses nearby:  one in
Santa Monica, another Culver City.

Her specific address in Culver City.

She shouldn’t have been surprised, she thought, that he could find it
in on the Internet.  What couldn’t people find?

What did surprise her was the accompanying message:

10 miles or 12 miles.  Your choice.  I’m not afraid of
your questions.  Don’t be afraid of the answers.

Sarah looked up into his waiting gaze.  And realized that was exactly
what she felt:  afraid.

Twenty-nine

In her second year of law school, Sarah took a night class called
Negotiation, taught by an adjunct professor whose day job was as a litigator in
one of the bigger law firms in L.A.

It was different from any other class she had taken so far, mainly
because it was practical.  He didn’t assign some textbook in negotiation.  Instead
he told war stories, gave specific examples from his years on the front lines,
and made the students practice their skills in front of him.

So much of what he taught was the psychology of dealing with an
opponent:  how to assess the other lawyer’s personal weaknesses, including
pride, fear, and the need to always look good.

One night it was Sarah’s turn, along with a classmate of hers named
Troy, to practice a negotiation in front of the class.  The professor gave them
a scenario:  Sarah was the defense attorney in a medical malpractice case in
which the plaintiffs’ child had died during surgery.  Troy represented the
parents.  The professor told them this was their last meeting before the trial
began, and they were to try to settle the case.

Beyond that, he let them make up any facts they wanted.

Troy, a very theatrical and demonstrative guy Sarah knew from their
Trial Practice class, began right away, really pouring on the pathos, reminding
Sarah how devastated the parents were, how sympathetic the jury would be, how the
doctor Sarah represented had absolutely no hope of leaving the courtroom room
owing less than ten million dollars.

While he ranted and gesticulated, Sarah took her time pulling out a
chair from behind the professor’s table, then bringing it out to the center of
the arena and sitting down.  She had a relaxed expression on her face as she listened
to Troy and watched him expend every last ounce of energy trying to force her
to pay him what he wanted.

When he finally took a breath, Sarah said quietly, “I can only get you
two.”

“Two million!” Troy shouted at her.  “Are you out of your friggin
mind?  This is a dead kid case.  Do you know what those are worth?  Your guy’s lucky
we’ll let him walk away for eight.”

“I can get you two,” Sarah repeated calmly, and Troy went back to his
rant.

Finally the professor called time.

And pointed to Sarah.

“She was going to win that negotiation—do you know why?”

Sarah could see from the faces of her classmates that no one agreed. 
Troy clearly had the upper hand, they must have thought, with all that power
and force behind his argument.

“
Status
,” the professor said.  “Henley had the higher status.”

“She just sat in a chair the whole time,” one of her classmates said.

“Right,” the professor answered.  “She stayed calm and didn’t let
herself get drawn in.  She had her number, and she stuck to it.  Collins here
could have popped a blood vessel in his brain from arguing so hard, but Henley
was never going to give in.  Am I right?” he asked her.

“I might have given him a million more,” Sarah said.  “But that was
going to be it.”

The professor pointed at her.  “She had a plan.  She didn’t show up
wondering what she was going to do, she already
knew
.”

“But that’s stupid,” someone else argued.  “The whole point is to
negotiate.”

“No, the point is to
win
a negotiation,” the professor said. 
“And the way you do that is to make sure you always maintain your higher
status.  When you shout and loom over people and try to bully them, you’re
weak.  The quieter you are, the less you say, the stronger you look.  You want
to be the rock the waves crash up against—not the puny wave.  No question in my
mind:  Henley would have won.”

It was one of her favorite moments in law school, and one of her
favorite classes.  The lessons she learned helped mold her into the kind of
attorney she was now.  The professor taught her to think strategically in ways she
never had before.

And she was about to apply one of those lessons now.

“Is it better to go to your opponent’s office for a negotiation,” the
professor asked the class one night, “or make him come to you?”

“Come to you,” most of the class answered.

Sarah said nothing.  Because she already knew enough of this professor
to know he rarely followed conventional wisdom.

“No, you go to them,” he said.  “For two reasons:  first, you can
leave.  That means you always have the power of walking away if the other side
doesn’t give you what you want.  Second, it displays confidence.  Since
everyone believes the same thing you do—or did until now, I hope—it means one of
two things will happen:  they’ll either wonder why you’re so willing to go to
them, which will make them suspicious and off-balance, or they’ll think you
don’t understand such an obvious element of strategy, which will make them
overconfident.  Either way, you’re in the stronger position.”

Sarah had sat there listening with a huge smile on her face.  It was as
if the professor kept handing her all the keys to life.

And it was why she now wrote back to Burke: 
Your place
.

***

Sarah stood on the threshold of his front door, studying the room
behind him.

It was dark everywhere hers was light:  dark hardwood floors, dark
rugs, dark furniture, dark cabinets in the kitchen instead of the ones she had
painted white.

“Your brooding phase?” she asked, before realizing he might not see
anything wrong with it.

Joe glanced behind him.  “It came decorated.  I don’t have the touch,
as you know.”

She did.  His old apartment near UCLA contained a mishmash of furniture
he collected from his parents and various other relatives and friends.  Joe was
never poor the way Sarah was—he had grown up in Palo Alto with parents who both
worked for tech companies—but Joe liked to spend money on things that were
important to him.  A stylish apartment was not one of them.

“Want something to drink?” Joe asked as she followed him inside.

Good question
,
Sarah thought.  Would it be better to stay
completely sober and alert, or to ease her nerves with a little lubrication?

“Wine,” she said.  “Or beer—whatever you have.”

“Beer I always have.”

He opened the shiny black door of his refrigerator, pulled out two
bottles, and set them on the spotless counter.

“Cleaning woman?” Sarah guessed.

“What, you don’t think this is all me?”

Considering what a slob he’d been in law school, Sarah doubted it, but
maybe he had matured and changed.

“I’m hardly here anymore,” he told her, “but she still comes in twice a
month, whether I need it or not.”

Her mother would love having a client like that, Sarah thought.  But
she doubted whether any of her mother’s customers had Joe’s kind of money.

He popped the tops on both beers and handed her one.  Then he motioned
her toward the living room.

She chose the dark gray couch and let him have the dark leather chair. 
She kicked off her shoes and pulled her feet up under her.

“Comfortable?” Joe asked.

“Not particularly.”

He left the room for a moment and returned with a folded blanket. 
Sarah took off her suit jacket and wrapped the blanket over her.  Then she took
a sip of beer.

“Well, I think we know why we’re all here,” Joe began, and even though
he tried to make a joke of it, Sarah could hear the tension in his voice.  Was
he afraid, despite what he’d said?  “Do you want to ask the questions, or do
you just want me to tell you?”

“Tell me,” she said.  She wasn’t sure she wanted to be too involved in
the conversation.  It might be easier just to listen.

“How much do you know?” Joe asked.

“Not much,” she said.  “Thanksgiving, finals, then that was it.”  She
tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice, but she could hear it just the
same.

“First your birthday,” Joe said.  “You remember that.”

Sarah nodded.  She looked away and took another drink.

“I meant all of it,” Joe said.

She shrugged.

“Sarah . . . ”

“Doesn’t matter now,” she told him.  “Keep going.”

He hesitated, but obviously decided not to press it.

But of course she remembered.  Everything.  She had replayed that night
a million times.

Thanksgiving fell during the last week of November that year.  Sarah’s
birthday was the day before.  They celebrated before they both went home for
the holiday.

That was the night Joe gathered her into his arms after they’d made
love, and told her he loved her like crazy.  That he could barely stand to be
away from her for the four-day weekend.  That he loved her so much he wished he
hadn’t waited so long to come after her.  That she was everything he’d ever
wanted.

It was how Sarah felt, too.  It was how she felt from the very
beginning.  She had fallen for him so hard, it sometimes hurt just to look at
him.  She loved him like she never thought possible.  He felt like an extension
of her mind, her body, her soul.

“I want to marry you,” Joe had told her then.  “Not now, but after we
graduate.  I can’t imagine spending my life with anyone but you.”

She kissed him so hard she was surprised his teeth didn’t fall out. 
She told him yes, and then laughed at the tears spilling down her face.  He smudged
them away and kissed her, and they went right back to making love as if they had
never stopped.

Sarah drank another sip of beer and could feel how much tighter her
throat had become.  This was why she had never wanted to ask, she thought. 
Because asking meant remembering, and she had been fighting against that for
years.

“So you went home for Thanksgiving,” she prompted.  “And you found out
your mom was sick.”

Joe nodded.  “She’d been cancer-free for ten years.  Maybe I told you
that.  We thought it was over.  But when I went home, nobody even needed to
tell me—I could see it.  She’d lost so much weight, she looked like a
teenager.  And she just looked . . . bad.  My brother walked in about an hour
later, and the first thing out of his mouth was,
Shit, not again.
  That
was when they decided they’d better tell us.”

He hadn’t given her as many details back then, but she remembered the
look of shock and grief on his face when she saw him again that Sunday night
after Thanksgiving.  He wrapped his arms around her waist and buried his face
against her neck.  Then he sobbed—so hard, Sarah sobbed right along with him
before he could even tell her what was wrong.