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I giggled as tears crested my eyes. The idea made me sick to my stomach. What if Tyler didn’t want Brody? What if I told him about his son and he got up and walked away from us? I couldn’t imagine Tyler doing something like that. It didn’t seem like him. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. But children always changed things. It had for me. I became a completely different person after having Brody.

Talking with my mother had helped to make things simpler, but that one fear—that one question—threw me right back to square one. Now I wasn’t sure about anything again.

Tyler

“Mr. Richard! Come in. Sit down. I’ve been expecting you.”

“So, I know you’re technically a trial lawyer and deal mostly with criminal cases, but I was wondering how well that translated into the business sector.”

I stood and tucked my tie into my coat while Richard took a seat in my office.

“Being a trial lawyer means that so long as I have all the information at my disposal, I can defend or prosecute in court. Trial lawyer is more of an umbrella term that encompasses a range of things, from criminal suits to business ethics to civil suits.”

“Then I’m hoping you can take a look at something for me—on the clock of course.”

“Certainly. What is it?” I asked.

Richard pulled out a file of papers and slid them toward me.

“I just fired the in-house lawyer at my oil company because I found him engaging in some practices I didn’t agree with. Oil companies have shadows looming over them right now, and my lawyer was playing into those shadows. He’s made a mess of things, and I have no idea where to begin cleaning it up.”

“What kinds of thi—oh boy.”

I saw what he was talking about the second I opened the file. I scanned the documents and clocked unethical standard after unethical standard: cutting corners with pipelines and then writing legal mumbo jumbo that washed Richard’s hands of the whole thing, hiring practices that were less than appealing with missing paperwork that just so happened to be the most important pieces of the puzzle.

“You’re being sued,” I said.

“I am. And I want to clean it up.”

“You want to make it go away or you want to clean up the paperwork I have in my hand?” I asked.

“Both. This isn’t the way to run a business in this day and age. I don’t know what the rest of the world is doing, but I won’t be doing it. I want this to go away, and I want all of this shit I can identify in this paperwork to be reworded and fixed.”

“I can make that happen. The one thing courts enjoy above all else is a decent redemption story. But your reputation will temporarily take the fall for this. If you walk into that courtroom and admit that this is shady at best, they’ll rake you over the coals even once you do tell them you’re going to fix it.”

“I understand that. It’s the price of doing the type of business I do. But it needs to be fixed. I won’t have a company in the future if it isn’t.”

“Then I can fix it for you, Mr. Richard. I just don’t know where the hell you found this guy. This is rough stuff.”

“Not at Harvard. That’s for sure,” he said, grinning.

“You’re probably right on that one,” I said, laughing.

“So how bad is it?” he asked.

“It’s not as bad as some of the things I’ve seen, but it’s bad. I take it the employee paperwork at the back of this file is the person who’s suing you?”

“It is.”

“A lot is missing from their documents. Specifically, some things that aid medical insurance companies in identifying coverage and things regarding 401(k) benefits.”

“I saw that early this morning. I’m starting to wonder if they were intentional errors made somewhere along the line.”

“That isn’t my venue, so I don’t want to jump the gun. It could be that they’ve simply gotten lost in the system somewhere. That isn’t my concern, though it should be yours. It’s the wording on page fourteen, paragraph six, that does have me concerned: ‘An employee has sixty (60) days to turn in and finalize all paperwork regarding hire, until such time as the business requires it. After the sixty (60) days, any and all paperwork not received and finalized will default to company standards and require additional filing of paperwork to overturn.’”

“Meaning?”

“When an employee is hired, they have sixty days to get all their stuff in. If they don’t, it defaults to company standards. But, there are no company standards written out in the paperwork you’ve given me, which means there are none. So, in the case of the employee suing you, that could very well be interpreted to mean that since they didn’t get their 401(k) and medical documents in on time, they simply don’t have those benefits.”