Chapter 1: The Sticky Note in the Top Drawer

Imogen 0, Owen 0. A clean sheet, the first Monday in October, and I intended to keep it that way.

At a quarter past seven the loft was full of grey lake light. Owen was asleep face-down across two thirds of the bed, breathing like a man with nothing on his conscience. I dressed in the bathroom: the navy sheath, my father’s steel watch, black hair in the low bun I wear to work like a helmet. Plain black lace underneath, because I was going to be good this month. I fastened the fine gold chain at my nape and let the ring on it slide down inside the neckline until it lay cold between my breasts.

I should tell you now: the man I was cheating on was also the man I was cheating with.

I was thirty, a senior associate at Voss Kettering, and I had been married for two years to a thirty-two-year-old man that nobody at my firm knew I had ever kissed.

Rule zero, weekdays: I leave at 7:30, he leaves at 7:50, by different streets. At 7:29 I kissed the back of his neck, and he said “Mm, Counsel” into the pillow, and at 7:30 I took my ring off at the door and threaded it onto the chain.

Voss Kettering occupies floors eleven to fourteen of a glass tower on the river, and for eighteen months it has been governed, in matters of the heart, by Policy 9.2. Our managing partner, Harriet Voss, fifty-eight, silver bob, red lipstick, half-moon glasses on a cord, wrote it after a partner’s affair nearly cost the firm its biggest client. In its first month she fired two people under it. It prohibits relationships “commencing between employees after the effective date”. I have read it forty times. Commencing. Owen and I married at the Cook County clerk’s office five months before that date. Loophole or trap; I have spent eighteen months refusing to find out which.

So we hid it, and hiding, because it was us, became a game. Every Monday one of us writes a rule on a yellow sticky note, and it counts once we’ve both initialled it. Break the rule and you concede a point; the winner picks a forfeit; the loser can always veto. And there is a stop word, out of office, which ends the game on the spot. Neither of us has ever needed it.

At 9:02 I wrote the month’s first rule, NO TOUCHING ON FLOOR 12, initialled it IC and stuck it inside my top desk drawer.

At 9:40 Owen came up to “check my docking station”. Six foot two, a swimmer’s shoulders, a trimmed sandy beard, reading glasses pushed up into his hair and forgotten there. A lanyard with too many badges; his ring lives behind his ID card in the badge holder, where nobody has ever looked. He crouched by my desk, opened my drawer with one finger, read the note and initialled it with my pen. OM. He didn’t touch me. He smelled of cedar soap and, faintly, of the server room.

At half past ten Harriet appeared at my door. The offices on twelve have a frosted band across the glass at waist height, so the bullpen sees heads and shoulders and nothing below. Harriet’s head is enough.

“You’ll have seen my email. Northmen suite, Friday the twenty-third. Attendance is expected.” She tapped the frame. “And Halyard signs on the thirtieth. Call at twelve today. They’ll try to reopen the indemnity cap. Don’t let them.”