By all accounts, she was a fierce lawyer, fighting for her clients and getting them everything she thought they were due. She did her job, her due diligence, and put in her time. She busted her butt for every promotion, being passed up each time for someone willing to kiss a little more ass, someone male. When her promotion had come and her boss asked to see her in the conference room, she had finally felt validated. She was the first woman in the law firm to hold the title of junior partner. She was quickly becoming the go-to divorce lawyer in the city, even though her specialty in college was family law. Her client base was slowly becoming what it had been when she’d lived in California, when she would sit second chair to some of the most powerful lawyers celebrities could hire. Spouses scorned by adulterous affairs. Tech giants who made it big after they were married and now wanted out. They were people married to their careers who had fallen out of love with each other. It was cases like the latter that Rennie preferred. She wanted to work with people to find a happy medium, a smart and healthy resolution for everyone. She hated fighting dirty but would when required. It was those cases, the ones where the media meddled too much because her client had a substantial portfolio or had invented the next best thing, that would catapult her to be the most sought-after divorce lawyer in the area. She would rise to the top and make partner faster than anyone else in the firm.
The day after her promotion, she saw her office for the first time. When she first walked in, she thought her boss was playing a cruel joke on her, possibly showing her what she could have if she were ever to make partner, because there was no way the corner office with a view of the city was hers. He paraded her around the room, showing her the wet bar, the kitchenette with a refrigerator hidden behind the mahogany cabinet and under the black granite countertop. There was a large bathroom that had a black-and-teal-tiled stand-up shower, complete with dual showerheads and the option to switch to the overhead rain shower just in case the Seattle drizzle wasn’t enough for her. The bathroom looked like something her best friend, Brooklyn Hewett, had designed. Attached to the bathroom were a dressing room and a space for her to keep extra clothes and shoes. Her boss referred to it as small, but the closet was bigger than her one-bedroom walk-up. The more she looked around, the more she surmised this office wasn’t for her. He was dangling a prize in front of her, something for her to work toward. To continue the tour, he told her that the couch pulled out into a sleeper in case she needed to stay the night. In that moment, she wanted it. She wanted it all. She could easily see herself spending countless hours in her office, watching the sun set over the sound. She could see her future, sitting at the large desk stained a rich dark brown that almost looked black, curled up on the leather couch under the afghan her grandmother knitted for her in case of a snowstorm. Her future was in this room, and it was within her grasp.
Rennie hadn’t believed this was her office, not even when her boss placed the keys in her hand. It wasn’t until maintenance installed the gold-plated nameplate outside the door, etched with her name, that it finally sank in. She stayed late the night it went up, well after everyone had gone home and only the glow from the auto-timed night-lights illuminated the pathways to the exits, to drag her fingers across the hollowed letters of her name, Renee Wallace. She traced each one until the pad of her index finger was sore. Years of hard work and determination came down to this moment. She had finally been recognized for her worth.
Those feelings lasted about five minutes. It wasn’t long after she moved into her new office that her coworkers started mumbling under their breath. According to gossip, the only reason for her promotion was because she had devoted herself to the job. She didn’t have kids or a spouse, nothing forcing her to leave at five or six o’clock to rush home. Day cares and schools didn’t phone needing her attention. The midnight flu didn’t force her to call in sick the next day to care for her child. The doctor’s appointments, early dismissals, snow days, or field trips taking time away from other staff wouldn’t affect her. To everyone around her, she got the promotion because she was alone, not because she’d earned it.