When My Boss Covered Up His Affair With the Intern

The restaurant Calvin picked had white tablecloths and low light, the kind of place where deals get made over dessert nobody eats. I got there eleven minutes early anyway. Old habit. Never let anyone see you arrive rattled.

Calvin stood when I walked up. He always did that, even back in law school, even when it wasn't cool to.

"Jade Collins." He smiled like this was a coincidence and not a crisis. "You look like someone who hasn't slept."

"I look like someone who spent her weekend cleaning up a privilege breach." I sat before he could pull out my chair. "Let's not pretend this is a date, Calvin."

"Wouldn't dream of it." He sat too, folding his hands on the table. "Talk to me."

So I did. I laid it out the way I'd laid out closing arguments — no apologies, no excuses, just facts stacked in order. The documents that went out. The clawback notice already filed. The revised protocol so it never happened again. I watched his face while I talked, waiting for the moment he'd push, the moment he'd ask why a firm as prestigious as Henderson & Wright let a summer associate near anything sensitive at all.

He didn't ask. He just listened, turning his wine glass slowly by the stem.

"You didn't send those documents," he said finally.

"No."

"But you're the one sitting across from me at ten p.m. fixing it."

"That's the job."

"That's not the job. That's you." He said it plainly, no charm in it, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd tried. "I remember you in Con Law. First to raise your hand, last to leave the room. Everyone else was performing for Halloran. You were actually trying to get it right."

I felt something loosen in my chest, some knot I hadn't noticed I'd been carrying since Friday. "That was a long time ago."

"You haven't changed much." He refilled my glass without asking, which should have annoyed me and didn't. "The merger's still moving forward, by the way. My board isn't thrilled, but they're not walking. Consider that a professional courtesy."

"Consider it appreciated."

We talked longer than we needed to. About nothing that mattered to the case — his sister's wedding, my terrible new associate, the fact that neither of us had eaten a real meal since Thursday. It was easy in a way dinners with Simon had never been easy, even in the beginning. Nobody was performing. Nobody was checking their phone under the table.

Outside, the air had that wet cold that promises snow and never delivers. Calvin walked me to the cab stand, held the door while I climbed in.

"You're wasted over there, Jade." He said it low, almost to himself. Then he shut the door and stepped back before I could answer.

I thought about it the whole ride home. I was still thinking about it when I fell asleep at one in the morning, and I was still thinking about it, four hours later, when my alarm went off.

Simon's office door was already shut when I got the summons. Blinds angled. Not a good sign.

"Sit," he said.

"I'll stand."

He came around the desk instead of behind it, arms crossed. "You had dinner with Calvin Reyes last night."

"I had a client management dinner with opposing counsel's principal, because your intern leaked privileged documents to his firm." I kept my voice flat. "You're welcome, by the way."

"You understand how this looks." He wasn't listening. "You, alone, with him, while we're in active litigation."

"How it looks to who?"

"To me."

The word sat there between us, ugly and small.

"You don't get to question my integrity," I said, "when you can't even manage your own intern."

His jaw went tight. "This isn't about Aylani."

"It's always about Aylani." I heard my own voice rise for the first time in longer than I could remember. "You gave her two extra days on a task I could do in my sleep. You overrode me in front of the entire team. And now you're standing here asking me about my integrity because I did my job and cleaned up her mess over dinner?"

"Lower your voice."

"No." I didn't. "You want to talk about how things look? Let's talk about how it looks when a senior partner fetches coffee for a summer associate every single morning. Let's talk about how that looks."

His face went white, then red. "That is not the same thing."

"It's exactly the same thing."

Through the glass, I saw Derek Shaw slow his pace in the hallway, a stack of files clutched to his chest, eyes carefully forward and ears very much not. Simon saw him too. His voice dropped, but the words didn't get any softer.

"We are done with this conversation."

"We've been done for a while," I said, and walked out before he could see that my hands were shaking.