Chapter 225

You, Gemma and Sabrina were all sitting in the main conference room, surrounded by boxes full of files. Garrison was standing amongst them, arms crossed over his chest. “Not the Monday afternoon you were expecting?”

“Uh, not really, sir,” you said. “But that’s the job.”

“We’re more than happy to do it,” Gemma nodded.

“Good,” Garrison nodded. “But here’s a little bonus; this case is slotted to run the third week of July. All of these files won’t take that long for you to get through - or it better not, or I’ve wildly misjudged you three - but we need them done ASAP so that the Associates can do their due diligence and write up the briefs and reports. Usually we’re the firm organizing the mergers, not trying to fight one, or else we’d likely just have the Associates do this sort-and-search themselves. But we’ve got you three here. If you do a good job on this, you can come sit in the gallery when we take this thing to court.”

“Sounds great, sir,” Sabrina nodded.

“Good,” Garrison nodded. “Well, I’ll let you get to it. This job is priority one - Andy and Eric can pick up any other emergency work that anyone wants to toss at the intern pool.”

“Got it,” you nodded.

Garrison nodded and left.

“How many boxes did he say this was?” Gemma asked, looking around at the stacks of boxes.

“Seventy-three,” Sabrina said. “And it’s the first half.”

“Fuuuuuck,” Gemma groaned. She stood up and opened the closest box to her. “Oh, for shit’s sake, it’s all loose papers!”

“God damn it,” you sighed, checking another box and finding it was full of loose files as well. “OK. I’ll go get some more empty boxes and a shitload of files. We’ll need to start sorting by date first, I guess?”

“Mmm, type and then date,” Sabrina said. “I’m seeing memos, emails and what I think is an expense report in here.”

“I think I might start bleeding out of my eyes,” Gemma said.

“It’s gotta be a tactic,” you said. “There’s no reason a law firm would do this unless they were trying to hide something in paper. We might not know what we’re looking for, but we can make it easier for the people who do.”

“Yep,” Gemma said. “We’ll be lauded as the heroes of alphabetization. Saving the world one document at a time.”

You left Sabrina and Gemma as they started clearing off the conference room table to create a workspace. The stock room was mirrored to the copy room on the floor, and going inside made you briefly think of that first encounter with Sabrina on a Monday afternoon not so many weeks ago that had led to ... well, everything. You took a moment alone in the stock room to just smile to yourself.

It really was amazing what you had gotten out of one little decision.

You had a stack of three empty boxes gripped in one hand, and another one full of bundles of empty files under the other, when you backed out of the storage room and bumped into someone who let out a squawk. You turned and felt like you almost shit yourself.