Page 52 of The Havenport Collection

Astrid

January

“ A re you sure you’re okay up there? You can come here if you want.” I looked around my new home. It wasn’t bad. It was a far cry from my luxury apartment in downtown Boston, but on the plus side, it had a lovely ocean view.

“Thanks, Emily. I’m fine,” I replied. “The cottage is perfect.”

The little cottage was charming in its shabby-chicness, bursting with pillows, paintings, and tchotchkes.

A worn, plush couch faced a brick fireplace in the tiny living room, and there was a small kitchen in the back, stuffed with every possible kitchen tool and gadget known to man.

Not that I would be using any of them, but even I could appreciate the value of a well-stocked kitchen.

It had a small porch that looked out over the bluffs, and as I stood there, freezing my ass off in the January cold, a sort of calm settled over me.

I wasn’t in the city anymore. And I wasn’t necessarily mad about that.

“What can I get you? Do you need anything?” Her kindness meant a lot to me. Emily was my first cousin. We were nothing alike. I was quiet and serious, and Emily was zany and adventurous, but somehow our childhood bond developed into a genuine adult friendship.

I briefly saw red. I was still so angry. How could they treat me like this? After everything I had done for the firm? I could feel the lava travel up my esophagus. I had to unpack and find my heartburn medication. “I’m good. I have everything I need to kick back and unwind for a couple of days.”

The cottage belonged to my aunt Connie. She was my father’s younger sister and the only extended family I had any contact with growing up.

She was an eccentric sort, an artist who had fled the city for the idyllic small town of Havenport, Massachusetts sometime in the 1970s.

Here she had found some success, opening a gallery and marrying her first husband.

Emily and her sister, Grace, grew up here, among the bluffs and the dunes and the charming small-town festivals.

I associated this place with fun and freedom, which may have been the reason the first call I made after being fired from my law firm was not to my mother, but to my aunt.

As a kid, I would come visit Havenport in the summer, and I loved every second of it.

My cousins lived a few minutes from the historic downtown, and after dinner we would walk to get ice cream cones and watch the fishing boats unload their daily catch.

It was an idyllic sort of place—safe, clean, and everyone knew everyone.

My cousins had lots of friends, participated in fun activities, and had the kind of free-range, charming childhoods I longed for.

My childhood, by contrast, was one of strict discipline and formality.

I was raised in a historic mansion in Brookline, Massachusetts by my mother and a series of nannies.

My mother, the right honorable Justice Mary Wentworth, was a judge on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

She was consistently ranked by Boston Magazine as one of the most powerful women in Massachusetts.

She had been nominated to the bench when I was in middle school and worked her way up the courts to her current position.

She was widely regarded as a legal genius and a fair and tolerant jurist. Her life was a series of high stakes legal decisions and grand parties and networking events. All of which I hated.

She devoted her life and career to public service and the pursuit of justice.

That left very little time for being a mother, a role she outsourced as much as she could.

When I was a kid, she never came to parent-teacher nights or to school plays or concerts.

She did begrudgingly attend my graduations, but only because I was graduating from prestigious institutions.

I attended private school and left home at fourteen to attend Miss Farmer’s Academy in Connecticut, the preeminent prep school for the daughters of Boston and New York elites.

After Miss Farmer’s, it was on to Yale and then to Harvard Law School, where, to the embarrassment of my mother, I only finished fourth in my class.

Then I spent one year clerking for a federal judge before starting my career at Burns & Glenn, one of the world’s largest law firms. I had spent six years chained to my desk, churning out billable hours and getting yearly pats on the head.

I had skipped vacations, friends’ weddings, holidays, and countless meals, workouts, and nights of sleep.

I had one goal—partnership. The brass ring.

The ultimate validation of all my hard work and sacrifice.

Every minute of my life to date had been precisely calculated to help me achieve my goal.

And it was all for naught. One day I was the hardest-working, highest-achieving senior associate at the firm, and the next I was a liability who required an investigation.

Emily interrupted my thoughts as I stared out the window. “Do you want to tell me what happened? I’m happy to listen.”

I took a deep breath, but it did nothing to calm the angry fire inside me.

It wasn’t just my stomach. Every cell in my body burned with rage, and I didn’t know what to do with it.

I had spent my entire life with a mask of calm on my face.

I sat and negotiated with opposing counsel for hours without so much as a yawn or a pee break.

I could pull an all-nighter and charm clients at a seven a.m. breakfast meeting the next day.

I was a stone-cold badass and yet it wasn’t enough for them.

Nothing I did was enough for them. Because I was a woman and the deck was stacked against me.

Everything I’d worked for since middle school had disappeared in the last seventy-two hours and I was too shocked to cry.

But the rage. The rage that had simmered on the periphery for years was starting to bubble up inside me.

The volcano of anger and disappointment had been dormant too long, and I knew I was going to blow soon.

“It’s complicated, Em. They fired me.”

“What? Fired you? You are the hardest-working associate they’ve ever had, and your mom is a goddamn judge.”

“I know.” I had given them six years of my life.

I had never made a mistake, my reviews were excellent, and my client relationships were strong.

I had the makings of an exceptional partner and everyone there knew it.

I volunteered for client pitches, wrote academic articles in my nonexistent spare time, and represented the firm at professional conferences and law school recruiting fairs.

And yet, in a few short months I had gone from all-star to pariah. “They said I made a mistake. They said I accidentally sent a confidential document to opposing counsel, jeopardizing negotiations in a billion-dollar merger.”

“What?”

“I know I didn’t. I couldn’t have.” I paced around the tiny living room.

“And when I asked for proof—the emails, the metadata, screenshots—they couldn’t give me anything.

” As attorneys we were trained to always organize the evidence before making accusations.

We were trained to know the answer to questions before you asked them.

So why did they come at me with such flimsy accusations and no evidence?

“That is total bullshit…oh crap, I meant caca,” she spat. I heard one of her kids laughing in the background and assumed she would be making a healthy donation to the swear jar tonight.

When the managing partner had sat me down, he seemed so disappointed.

“We never expected this from you, Astrid. It’s a shame—you have been such a bright spot in your associate cohort.

” John Waterson was a sharp-looking man in his sixties who built his reputation on his aggressive tactics and take no prisoners attitude.

He was rich, elitist, out of touch, and just a little bit mean—the perfect BigLaw partner.

When I pushed back on him, he acted shocked.

Like how dare I ask for concrete evidence of my career-ending mistake?

If he was looking for me to sit there and take it, then he was sorely mistaken.

I was many things, but a doormat was not one of them.

“When I asked for more information, he noted the poor review I had received from Max Shapiro and some rumblings within the partnership that I was ‘not as committed’ as I used to be.”

“What?”

“It is total bullshit.” My commitment to the firm and my clients was unwavering.

“I looked him in the eye and asked for an example of this lack of commitment. He was unable to provide a single one. The real mistake I made was not reporting that smarmy motherfucker Max Shapiro, not anything related to client documents.”

“Good for you. I’m glad you didn’t back down.”

“So I serenely asked him to provide actual facts to back up these assertions, and he told me to ‘calm myself.’”

“You have got to be shitting me. He did the old, sexist ‘calm down, you crazy woman’ play?”

“Yup. Then he suggested that I not get ‘so emotional.’”

“OMG.”

“I wanted to ‘emotionally’ punch him in his wrinkled old man balls.” But, being the consummate professional that I was, I sat quietly and calmly advocated to keep my job.

Total coded sexist bullshit. “He seemed so surprised that I wouldn’t go quietly into the good night with the generous severance package and an ironclad noncompete. ”

“What happened?”

“I refused to sign the liability waiver that they require before they pay you severance. Basically you waive all your rights to sue the firm.”

“So you don’t get severance?”

“Nope. I have ninety days to sign it, and if I don’t, not only do I not get severance, I won't get a recommendation from the firm. Which I need if I have any hope of getting another job.”