Chapter 22: Investigation.
Liam closed the door behind Vanessa and stood there for a long moment.
The apartment felt different now. He couldn’t explain it. Something lingered in the air—her perfume, maybe. Something floral with a hint of vanilla or maybe it was just the echo of her voice, still bouncing around his skull.
He walked to the window and watched her leave the building. She moved like she knew people were watching. Head high. Shoulders back. That deliberate sway in her hips that was either natural or the most practiced thing he had ever seen.
"She rubs me the wrong way", Liam thought.
He couldn’t describe it, not precisely. It wasn’t anything she said.
Her words had been professional, almost rehearsed. She had laughed at his jokes, held his gaze and conversation like an old friend.
But something underneath it all felt... wrong.
"Sara."
The name surfaced unbidden. Liam’s jaw tightened.
Vanessa felt like Sara in a different body. Same confidence and very similar smile. She even had the same way of looking at a man like she was calculating his worth in real time. Younger than him—probably twenty-three, twenty-four. Blonde instead of brunette, thicker instead of slim. But that energy? That predatory patience? One word, PTSD.
He had learned his lesson.
No more younger women, no more drama, and no more waking up to find his bank account drained with his reputation in shambles.
Liam turned away from the window and walked to his desk. A small wooden thing he had bought from a vintage shop years ago. Scratched on one corner but very functional.
He pulled out his laptop and sat down.
"Let’s see what they’re really offering."
He searched for the firm, the one Mrs. Harriet mentioned.
The New York branch, it took a few minutes of digging—the company website was deliberately vague about satellite offices—but he found it.
Coleman & Associates.
A quick cross-reference with property records. A few clicks through legal directories. And then Liam pulled up street view.
His stomach dropped.
The building was a dump.
Three stories of weathered brick in a neighborhood that hadn’t seen economic growth since the nineties. Graffiti on the adjacent wall with bars on every window. A pawn shop on the corner and a check-cashing place across the street. The kind of area where you didn’t walk alone after dark, and even during the day, you kept your head down.
"This is what they want me to run?" Liam muttered.
He zoomed out and it got worse, the surrounding blocks were worse. Abandoned storefronts, liquor stores, and a bus stop with a bench that had been tagged so many times the original color was unrecognizable.
Liam sat back in his chair.
"Crime rate is high", he thought. "Client base would be low-income."
He wasn’t a fool, he knew what this was. They wanted him to take a rundown office in a dangerous part of New York and somehow turn it into something profitable. They wanted him to work miracles with no budget, no resources, and no backup.
And the clients? They would be the ones who couldn’t afford better lawyers. The ones who paid in installments or not at all. The ones whose cases were noble but never lucrative.
Liam had nothing against poor people. He had been poor once so he understood the struggle in a way that most of his former colleagues never would.
But he also understood business.
A law firm couldn’t survive on moral gratification alone. Rent needed to be paid, staff needed salaries as liability insurance wasn’t cheap.
If the majority of his clients were from the lower end of the social ladder, the numbers would never work.
"They’re setting me up to fail", Liam realized.
Or worse—they were setting him up to be grateful. To work his ass off for pennies while they patted themselves on the back for giving him a second chance like some stray dog.
Something didn’t add up, Liam knew they obviously planned to pour some resource to turn the place around but it didn’t change the overall environment nor the people that lived in it.
He liked challenges but this felt a little too risky to uproot his life to relocate.
Liam closed the street view and leaned forward, elbows on the desk. His mind was racing now, chasing connections he hadn’t considered before.
Why fire him at all? If the video was private, if the policy was questionable, why not just demote him? Suspend him? Shove him into a corner office with no window and let him rot?
Instead, they had terminated him very publicly. And then, almost immediately, offered him a lifeline.
"Unless the termination was the mistake", Liam thought.
Unless someone had acted without thinking and this is to make up for it?
Liam’s eyes drifted to the stack of papers on the corner of his desk. The termination letter. He had barely glanced at it when it arrived—too busy drowning in self-pity, too distracted by Sara’s betrayal and Richard’s fists.
But now?
Now he was thinking clearly.
He reached for the letter. Flipped to the second page as his eyes scanned the dense legal text, searching for the section on termination conditions or rather, why he was terminated.
The paragraph about public behavior and the clause that defined what constituted a fireable offense.
There it was.
Section 14, paragraph B.
Liam’s finger traced the lines. His lips moved silently as he read.
"Indecent or objectionable behavior that is publicly visible or reasonably likely to become public shall constitute grounds for immediate termination."
He was about to read further—to dissect the wording, to see if a private Instagram story qualified—when his phone rang.
The screen lit up with Darren’s name.
Liam hesitated. His finger hovered over the paragraph, Liam had no idea how close he was from discovering the reality of his situation.
The phone kept ringing.
[Darren.]
Liam sighed. The letter could wait, the call couldn’t. Darren had never been one to reach out first. If he was calling, it was important.
Liam grabbed his phone and swiped to answer.
"Hey, what’s up?"
