The Key. Jennifer Sturman

could have just been trying to screw Wife Number One in some new way. Or maybe another ‘she’ entirely.”

      “Could be. He sure didn’t seem like the faithful type.”

      “I still can’t get over the way he came onto you,” he said, shaking his head. “He really was a bastard.”

      “It happens.”

      “But in this day and age, and after all of the lawsuits you read about and diversity training and everything?”

      “You’d be surprised.” Maybe it was the wine on an empty stomach or maybe it was the shock of that morning—either way, I found myself telling Jake about some of the other uncomfortable encounters I’d had with male colleagues and my “insurance policy.” It was nice to be able to talk to someone about it.

      “It amazes me how sexist this profession still is,” Jake said in disbelief. “It makes me ashamed to be a guy, practically. But it’s a good idea, keeping a record like that.”

      “I just hope I’ll never need it.”

      “Does anybody else know?”

      “About the notebook? Just my friend, Luisa. It was her idea in the first place.”

      “Not even your fiancé?”

      “Peter? No. He’s already upset enough about how hard I work. And he gets angry when I tell him about partners acting like assholes; he’d go ballistic if he knew they were acting like lecherous assholes.” I paused. “Why? Do you think I should tell him?”

      Jake flashed his rueful smile again. “You’re asking the wrong guy. As my ex-wife would attest, not to mention everyone I dated before her, I’m not exactly an expert at relationships.” He took another sip of his bourbon.

      “Me, neither.” My track record before Peter had been more than a little checkered on the good judgment front. Then with a jolt I remembered the other thing I’d wanted to talk to Jake about. “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you this,” I said.

      “Tell me what?”

      “Last night. There was an anonymous e-mail on my home account about Perry and the Thunderbolt deal.” I explained about the e-mail and what Peter and I had sent back.

      “What a strange thing to happen.”

      “Mostly it was just creepy.”

      “I bet. I wonder why this Man of the People guy got in touch with you, specifically? How did he even know you were working on the deal? Do you think it’s somebody who knows you but didn’t want you to know who he is?”

      “Could be. Although, I had another idea, too. Dahlia mentioned yesterday that two different people had called from Thunderbolt for a team list. Maybe one of them was actually this Man of the People guy and he was only pretending to be from Thunderbolt. She would have given out all of our names.”

      “Names, yes, but how did he get your personal e-mail address? And why did he contact you, instead of me? Or Mark, for that matter?”

      Peter and I had discussed this at length. “He may have tried different variations of all of our names at all of the likely e-mail services—AOL, Hotmail, Verizon. My home account is nothing clever—just my first name and my last name plus my broadband provider. He could have sent out dozens of other e-mails, most of them to addresses that don’t exist or belong to other people. And if they belonged to other people, they wouldn’t have responded—they wouldn’t have had any idea what the e-mail was about. And maybe he did try to e-mail you, and Mark, too, but he didn’t hit on the right addresses?”

      “I definitely didn’t get anything on my Yahoo account. I checked it last night.”

      “I just hope I did the right thing. It felt wrong not to follow up in any way. If the deal is dirty, then it seems like I have a professional obligation to do something about it. But I didn’t want to get anyone at the firm involved before I knew more, because I didn’t want to give Gallagher even more reasons to hate me.”

      Jake nodded his head. “I think you did do the right thing. It was a bit of a catch-22, but you made the right decision. Even with Gallagher out of the picture, it’s probably better to find out what’s going on before making any accusations.”

      “I’m glad you think so.”

      “Will you let me know if you hear back from this guy?” he asked. “We should definitely get to the bottom of this, especially since Perry’s still so gung-ho on getting the deal done.”

      “Sure,” I said.

      It was good to know we were in this together.