CHAPTER 21: THE ETHICS BOARD

Sloane

The ethics board meeting was on a Wednesday.

Nine AM. Conference room on the sixteenth floor. Seven board members including two external reviewers who had been brought in specifically because the complaint involved a senior partner which meant the internal review process required outside oversight.

I had prepared for it the way I prepared for everything. Thoroughly and without telling anyone how thorough I had been.

Dara knew. Dara always knew. She had found me in my office at seven fifteen that morning and set a coffee on my desk and said you have been here since six haven't you and I had said no and she had looked at the chair I always pushed against the wall when I arrived early that was currently against the wall and said sure and left without another word.

Beckett had texted at eight forty five.

One line.

You already know everything you need to know.

I had stared at that for a moment.

Then I had put my phone in my bag and gone upstairs.

Strand was already in the room when I arrived.

Of course he was.

He was sitting three seats from the head of the table with a folder in front of him and an expression of professional concern that he wore the way some people wore a coat. Automatically. Completely. Like it had been put on so many times it had stopped requiring conscious effort.

He looked up when I walked in.

I looked back.

Neither of us said anything.

I sat down at the opposite end of the table.

The board members filed in over the next five minutes. Seven of them. Faces I knew to varying degrees. Helena Marsh who had seconded my request for a pause at the partners meeting and who I had always respected. Two external reviewers I did not know. Four others.

The chair of the board was a man named Owen Prescott. Sixty something. Careful in the way of someone who had been doing this specific job for a long time and had learned that careful was the only sustainable approach.

He opened the meeting at nine exactly.

"We are here to review a complaint filed by senior partner Phillip Strand regarding junior partner Sloane Mercer," he said. "Specifically allegations of professional conflict of interest arising from Ms. Mercer's personal relationship with Beckett Rowe of Rowe Industries given the firm's ongoing acquisition discussions with that company." He looked around the table. "We will hear from Mr. Strand first. Then from Ms. Mercer. Then the board will ask questions of both parties."

Strand spoke for twelve minutes.

I listened to every word.

He was good. I had always known he was good and sitting across from him while he built his case I could see exactly why he had survived in rooms like this for as long as he had. He was precise. Measured. He acknowledged complexity where acknowledging it made him look reasonable and he used that reasonableness as a frame for everything else he said.

The conflict of interest angle. The appearance of impropriety. The question of whether Sloane Mercer's judgment in matters related to the acquisition could be trusted given her personal involvement with the acquiring party.

He never said anything that was technically false.

That was the thing about Strand. He never needed to lie. He just arranged true things in a particular order and let the arrangement do the work.

When he finished Prescott looked at me.

"Ms. Mercer," he said.

I opened the folder in front of me.

I spoke for nine minutes.

Not twelve. Nine. Because everything I needed to say fit in nine minutes and using more time than necessary was a habit of people who were not confident in their material.

I addressed the conflict of interest allegation first.

The firm's policy required disclosure of personal relationships that created active conflicts with ongoing firm business. The acquisition discussions between Rowe Industries and Kellner and Cross had been formally paused six weeks before my personal relationship with Beckett Rowe developed beyond the terms of the original arrangement. I had documentation of the pause date. I had documentation of the timeline of my personal relationship. The conflict of interest policy applied to active conflicts. There was no active conflict at the time the relationship developed.

I set those documents in the center of the table.

Then I addressed the documentation Strand had submitted.

The information in his folder relating to my personal arrangement with Beckett Rowe had been obtained through unauthorized access to private correspondence. I had a signed statement from the party whose correspondence had been accessed confirming they had not provided this information to Strand voluntarily. Unauthorized access to private correspondence to build a professional complaint was itself a violation of firm policy under section fourteen of the conduct guidelines.

I set that document on top of the others.

Then I looked at Prescott.

"I would also like to note for the record," I said carefully. "That new information has come to my attention regarding the professional conduct of the complainant himself. Information that I believe this board will want to review as part of a comprehensive assessment of this situation." I paused. "I am prepared to submit that information to the board today if the board wishes to receive it."

The room was very quiet.

Strand looked at me across the table.

I looked back at him.

For the first time since I had walked into this building knowing what I knew about him I let him see it. Not dramatically. Not as a performance. Just for one second I let him see in my face that I knew everything and that I had known for longer than he understood and that the documentation in front of the board today was not the full picture but the beginning of it.

His expression did not change.

But something behind his eyes did.

Good.

"The board would like to receive that information," Prescott said carefully.

I reached into my folder and slid a second set of documents to the center of the table.

Not everything. Not the criminal material. Not the connection to Daniel or the mechanic or any of the things that were going to a different room with different people at a different time.

Just the financial arrangement between Strand and Kellner. The one that had bought Strand his position at the firm. Clean and documented and impossible to misread.

The board members read it.

Helena Marsh read it twice.

Strand was very still at the other end of the table.

Prescott looked up from the documents.

He looked at Strand.

Then at me.

"I think," he said slowly. "That we need to adjourn this meeting and schedule a more comprehensive review." He looked at the board. "Does anyone object."

Nobody objected.

Strand said nothing.

I closed my folder.

The hallway outside the conference room was empty when I came out.

I stood there for a moment.

My heart was doing something it had not been doing in the room. In the room it had been completely steady because I had needed it to be steady and I had made it be steady through the same mechanism I had been using since I was nine years old which was just deciding and then doing.

Out here with nobody watching it was doing something else entirely.

I pressed my back against the wall and took one real breath.

Then Dara appeared at the end of the hallway.

She had been waiting. Of course she had been waiting. She had probably been standing at the end of that hallway for the entire duration of the meeting.

She walked toward me and I looked at her and she looked at me and she said: "Well."

"Adjourned," I said. "Comprehensive review scheduled."

She closed her eyes for one second.

"And Strand," she said.

"Sitting in a room with seven people who just read a document explaining how he bought his way into this firm," I said.

Dara opened her eyes.

"Sloane," she said.

"I know," I said.

"That was the beginning not the end."

"I know that too."

She looked at me for a moment.

Then she did something she had never done in three years of working together.

She hugged me.

Brief. Fierce. The hug of someone who had been watching you carry something heavy and was relieved to see you finally put some of it down.

I held on for a second.

Then we stepped back and she smoothed her jacket and I smoothed mine and we were professional again in the way that we were always professional even when we were also something more than that.

"Coffee," she said.

"Desperately," I said.

We went downstairs.

I texted Beckett from the lobby.

Three words.

First round ours.

He replied in under thirty seconds.

I know. Prescott called Marcus twenty minutes ago.

I stared at that.

Then I typed: You have a contact on the ethics board.

His reply: Marcus went to law school with Prescott. They play squash on Thursdays.

I stood in the lobby holding my phone.

Then I typed: Is there anywhere in this city where you do not have a connection.

A pause.

Then: The outer boroughs mostly. Do you need something in Queens.

I laughed.

Out loud. In the lobby of the firm. A real laugh that surprised me with how good it felt.

The woman at the front desk looked up.

I composed myself.

Typed back: I will see you at home.

His reply was immediate.

I will be there.

I put my phone in my bag.

Went back upstairs.

And spent the rest of the day working like someone who had just won the first round of something and understood completely that the fight was not over but was beginning to believe for the first time that they were going to win it.

That was enough.

For today that was more than enough.