He came in wearing a charcoal suit, polished shoes, and the practiced, arrogant smile of a lawyer who has won too many arguments before they even begin.
“I assume Harriet has already given you her dramatic version of events,” he said, barely glancing around the small apartment.
The suit told Harriet everything about the state of his mind as he walked in, and it was almost pitiable in hindsight.
He had dressed for this.
Summoned to a run-down apartment by his father at ten in the morning, he had put on the charcoal suit and the polished shoes and the expensive armor of his professional life, because that armor had never once failed him.
It was the uniform in which he won — in conference rooms, in negotiations, in the small daily contests where a well-cut suit and an unbothered smile establish before a word is spoken who is in control.
He had walked into that apartment expecting the same contest he always won: his composure against their emotion, his legal knowledge against their hurt, his practiced certainty against their disarray.
And the suit was meant to announce it. I am the calm professional here; the rest of you are having feelings. He could not conceive, walking through that door, that the contest was already over — that his father had spent the night finding the flaw in his foundation, that a seventeen-year-old receipt had already collapsed his keystone, that the small apartment he was barely glancing around held every document required to end him.
So he led with condescension, with your dramatic version of events, because condescension was the opening move that had always worked.
He was a man bringing a beautifully tailored suit to a fight that had already been decided, in a binder, at a folding table, at eleven o’clock the night before.
The arrogance was not strength.
It was a man who did not yet know he had already lost, performing a confidence that had exactly one more minute to live.
Blythe did not get up to greet him.
“It’s not a ‘version,’ Weston.