Heads

Of course she's in 3A.

You're in 3B. You check your boarding pass twice, then a third time, and then you sit down, because the flight attendant is giving you the look reserved for passengers who are about to become a problem.

Margo doesn't look up from her laptop. "You're on my armrest."

"It's a shared armrest."

"Nothing is shared, Wynne. There is only what you take and what you lose." She types something. "You're losing."

"Did you read that on a fortune cookie?"

"I wrote it on yours."

The man across the aisle has stopped pretending to read his magazine. He's looking at Margo the way people look at sunsets, a little stunned, mouth slightly open. She doesn't notice. Or she notices and has decided, years ago, that it isn't worth her time. You've never been sure which.

You open the Linwood file. She opens the same file. You both start on page one.

By the time the plane levels off you're on page forty and she's on page forty-two, and you know because you can see her screen, and she knows you can see her screen, and she angles it two degrees away from you with one finger.

"Petty," you say.

"Efficient."

The flight attendant comes by. "Something to drink?"

"Coffee," you both say.

"Black, one sugar," Margo adds, without looking at you. "For her."

You stare at her. She keeps typing.

"How do you know how I take my coffee?"

"Study group. First year. You made everyone wait while you found the sugar." Her mouth tightens. "It was very inefficient."

The Colonnade is old Louisville glamour: a marble lobby, brass elevators, a chandelier like a frozen waterfall. The lobby is crowded with festival people in seersucker and sundresses, and somewhere a bluegrass band is warming up in the courtyard.

The front desk clerk is young and very nervous. He looks at Margo, swallows, and looks at you instead, as if you're safer.

"Ms. Faraday. And Ms. Ava Wynne. Welcome. You're in the Corner Suite, eleventh floor. It's our best."

"How many bedrooms?" Margo asks.

He hesitates. "It's a very large suite."

"That's not a number."

"One," he says. "One bedroom. And a very nice sofa. Velvet."

"Do you have anything else? Anything at all?"

"Ma'am, there's not a hotel room free from here to Lexington. The festival." He gives her an apologetic smile. "There's a man in a Holiday Inn ballroom right now sleeping on a cot."

You glance at Margo. Margo glances at you. Neither of you blinks.

The suite is beautiful. That's the worst part. Tall windows, gold light, a sitting room with a writing desk and a long emerald velvet sofa, a bedroom beyond a set of double doors with a bed the size of a small country.

Margo walks straight to the bedroom doors and stands in them like a bouncer.

"No," you say.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to say seniority."

"I made senior associate three weeks before you."

"Because I was finishing a clerkship. That you didn't get."

Her jaw shifts. She reaches into her coat pocket and pulls out a coin, a heavy old silver dollar, worn smooth at the edges.

"My father's," she says. "His lucky coin. He flipped it before every union vote for thirty years." She holds it up. "Call it."

"You carry a lucky coin? You?"

"Call it, Wynne."

"Tails."

She flips it. It spins up, catches the window light, and lands in her palm. She slaps it onto the back of her hand and lifts her fingers.

Heads.

"Sofa's very nice," she says. "Velvet." She closes the bedroom doors in your face.

By eleven at night the sitting room looks like a crime scene. Files on the carpet. Files on the desk. Files on the velvet sofa you will apparently be sleeping on. You've ordered room service twice, and Margo, who reemerged in a cream silk shirt with her sleeves rolled, has eaten half of your fries without asking.

"Those are mine," you say.

"Allegedly." She takes another. "Look at this."

She drops an exhibit on your lap. A letter on yellowed paper, a photocopy of a photocopy, typed on an old machine with a crooked letter e.

Dated March 4, 1974. In consideration of the sum of one dollar and the mutual goodwill of our two houses, Linwood Hollow Distillery grants Ironbridge Spirits a perpetual right of first refusal on any sale, license or transfer of the Mae's Lantern name and recipe.

At the bottom, a signature. Big looping letters, confident, the kind of signature that belongs on a birthday card.

Mae Linwood.

"Ruby's wife," you say quietly.

"Late wife. Nine years." Margo sits on the arm of the sofa. "Ruby wants to put a minority stake in the brand into a trust for her grandson. Ironbridge says that's a transfer and they get to match any offer. Which they will. And then they own it."

"So the whole case is a dead woman's signature." Your own name is on the cover sheet under hers, Ava Wynne, Keswick Wexford LLP, and for once it doesn't feel like enough.

"The whole case is a dead woman's signature," Margo agrees, "and nobody alive who saw her sign it."

You look at the looping M. Somebody loved this woman enough to name a bourbon after her. Somebody built a life on this hillside with her.

"Ruby said in her intake call that Mae would never have signed this," you say.

"Clients always say that."

"Maybe sometimes clients are right."

Margo is quiet a moment. Then she stands, takes the letter back, and stacks it on the desk with the precise care of a woman squaring a deck of cards.

"Go to sleep, Wynne. We meet the client at eight."

She goes into the bedroom. The doors click shut.

You make up the sofa with the spare blanket from the closet. It's six inches too short. The velvet is slippery. Through the windows the festival keeps playing, a fiddle sawing out something sad and fast. You lie in the dark and stare at the ceiling and think about the corner office, and a looping M, and the way Margo said for her to the flight attendant without looking up.

Around midnight the bedroom doors open.

You go still, eyes half-closed. Don't say anything, Ava. Don't you dare. Margo stands in the doorway backlit by the bedside lamp, and her hair is down.

You've known her ten years. You've never seen her hair down. Not once. Not at the Law Review banquet, not at a single firm Christmas party, not at three in the morning before the Pribble arbitration. It falls past her shoulders, platinum, a little wavy from being pinned all day. Without the armor of the chignon she looks younger. Softer. Devastating in a way you are not prepared for.

She drops a second pillow on the end of the sofa.

"You'll get a crick in your neck," she says. "And then you'll complain about it for three weeks."

"Thanks," you manage.

She turns to go. Stops.

"One more thing," she says, not looking back. "You talk in your sleep, Wynne. You used to, in study group, when you fell asleep on the library couch." A pause. "I remember."

The doors close before you can ask her what you said.