Final Option

certain level Chicago is a very small town, the faces all familiar. How many people are there, after all, who are willing to put on a tuxedo or an evening gown (on a Wednesday night no less) and plunk down four hundred dollars for the dubious pleasure of eating mediocre food in a chilly museum? And yet there was something about it all that I found fundamentally disturbing.
    When I came back to Chicago to practice law I assumed that everyone who’d gone away to school had changed like I had—developed their own values and gained the distance to see through or at least evaluate their parents’ choices. It has never stopped surprising me that so many of the people I grew up with seem to have rushed back home, eager to take up exactly where their parents left off.
    Many of them were there tonight, still nodding acquaintances, the women dressed by de la Renta and dieted down to emaciation, discussing their horses, their divorces, and their nanny problems. The choices I’d made as an adult had turned me into an outsider. My relationship with Stephen only widened the breech. Half of my girlhood friends wondered what someone as handsome and available as Stephen Azorini could possibly see in me, while the other half wondered how I could possibly allow myself to be so blatantly used for my position. I looked at them, their hair sprayed into perfection, their jewelry glittering in the candlelight, smiling, gossiping, already planning for their cosmetic surgeries, and wondered whether I wasn’t a fool for choosing my worries over theirs.
    I thought of Detective Ruskowski and squirmed inside. There were too many unconnected pieces. Elena had seen a gun in Hexter’s drawer on Friday morning that hadn’t been there when I’d looked on Sunday. Bart Hexter had made an appointment to see Ken Kurlander. A young woman named Torey Lloyd claimed that she had been having an affair with Bart Hexter and wanted money. Someone had erased the files relevant to the CFTC’s case against Hexter Commodities. Black Bart had kept nude photos of a mystery woman in his drawer. The CFTC’s enforcement chief was straining at the leash, panting to come after us. And then there was the small matter that someone had gotten up Sunday morning, put a gun in their pocket, and waited for Bart Hexter at the end of his driveway.
    Stephen tapped me on the shoulder. I started and looked around me. All but a handful of the partygoers had already gone in to dinner. I wondered how long I’d been standing there, staring off into space.
     
    Instead of taking me home, I asked Stephen to take me back to my office so that I could pick up my purse, my briefcase, and my car. The new sapphire and diamond bracelet hung, glittering and unfamiliar, on my wrist.
    “My mother came to my office today,” I said, as we turned onto LaSalle Street.
    “That must mean it’s time to string fresh garlic around the doors. The old stuff must be wearing out.” I laughed.
    “She told me that you and I are going to be on the cover of Chicago Magazine.”
    “Damn her!” exclaimed Stephen. “I hadn’t even made up my mind whether to ask you about it. What did she tell you?”
    “That Chicago Magazine is planning an article on couples in the city where both the man and the woman have high-profile jobs. She named some of the other people whom they’re planning to interview, but I’ve forgotten who they are.”
    “How on earth did she find out?”
    “One of her friends has a daughter who works at the magazine. You have to understand that my mother is part of a gossip network where information is passed at the speed of light.”
    “Jody Synnenberg, our public relations director, approached me with the idea just this morning. She thinks it would be nice exposure for Azor. I said I’d talk to you about it.”
    “I would have thought you guys would have had all the press coverage you could handle for the next five years,” I remarked.
    “Jody said it would reach a more general audience than the business press.”
    “So you want to do it?”
    “Obviously it depends on how you feel about it,” said Stephen, pulling up in front of my office. He shifted into park and turned toward me. “I know how much you hate this kind of thing,” he said, quietly. “I don’t want to push you into the light if it makes you uncomfortable.”
    After beating back a corporate raider last year, Stephen’s classic profile graced the pages of every business periodical. Even I hadn’t been