Free A Conflict of Interest by Adam Mitzner Page A

me that Bruce Wayne is who Batman really is at
his
core?”
    “Since you’re asking,” I say with a smile because I know she’s not really interested in the answer, “no. In fact, it’s actually the opposite.”
    “How so, professor?”
    “Well, the Batman dichotomy is a crazy vigilante—that’s the Batman side—and the rich playboy, who is Bruce Wayne. No one
pretends
to be a crazy vigilante who fights arch criminals. If you go into that line of work, you’re pretty much a true believer. Which means that, at his core, Bruce Wayne is
really
Batman. The Bruce Wayne persona is the real disguise.”
    Abby laughs out loud. Now she clearly seems drunk to me. She leans back in her seat, causing her long hair to cascade around her face.
    “This is way too existential a discussion to comfortably follow given my current state of inebriation,” she says. “But riddle me this: which Alex Miller is with me now? The real one or the secret identity?”
    It’s a good question, one that I’d thought about before, but without ever coming to a satisfactory answer. When am I really me?

11
    W e leave Florida the next morning, booked on a 10:00 A.M . flight. Although I’m sure Ohlig is sorry to see Abby go, he points out that he has a wife and friends who do not charge him a thousand bucks an hour for the pleasure of their company.
    After clearing security at the West Palm airport, I excuse myself from Abby for a moment and call home, even though there’s no reason for me to be checking in. I called Elizabeth from the car last night on the way back from my mother’s house and told her I was going to sleep when I got back to the hotel. But my evening with Abby has shaken me, and I feel the need to be pulled back into my real life.
    Elizabeth answers the phone sounding concerned. “Everything okay?”
    “Yeah. Everything’s fine. I’m at the airport. I’m going to go straight into the office today, but I’ll be home tonight.”
    “Oh, I was worried. You usually don’t call me during the day. I don’t know, I thought maybe something was wrong with your mother.”
    “No. She’s good. I didn’t mean to worry you. I was just calling to say hello.”
    “Well, hello to you too then,” she says cheerfully. “Want to talk to the cannoli?”
    She means Charlotte, a long-standing joke, a line from
The Godfather
. When Charlotte was a baby and we travelled, I’d always say to Elizabeth, “I’ll take the bags, and you take the cannoli.”
    “Hi Daddy!” Charlotte screams. I sometimes think that Charlotte believes I won’t be able to hear her unless she shouts into the phone.
    “Hi baby. How are you today?”
    “Good,” she says, and then demonstrates just how much of her mother’s daughter she is. “Daddy, why are you calling? We talked last night.”
    “Just to say I love you.”
    “Oh. I love you too, Daddy. Here’s Mommy.”
    Elizabeth takes the phone back. “I think you worried her too,” she says, laughing.
    For me, however, it’s hardly a laughing matter. My father worked long hours, the necessity of which I never questioned growing up, but now I see it more as a choice he made. It’s not my place to judge him for it, at least not without all the facts. I don’t know if the store could have survived without him putting in such long hours, and it would certainly make me a hypocrite to criticize him now when his work put me through college and law school. But the fact remains that my daughter will someday think about my choices in the same light and wonder if I really needed to be at the firm all that time, or if I was avoiding something at home that I didn’t want to face.
    On the flight home, it’s business as usual between me and Abby. I’m a little fuzzy on how things precisely ended last night, but I’m sure that there was no inappropriate contact. I recall being in the elevator together, but somehow when I got out, she didn’t. I wonder if Abby would have followed if I’d asked, but now