Free I Knew You'd Be Lovely by Alethea Black Page A

earthquake enthusiast. At one point Felix balled up bits of his cocktail napkin and stuck them in his ears. Janet turned away. After she finished her Bloody Mary she began folding her empty peanuts bag into smaller and smaller triangles. Finally she said, “Is that so you won’t have to talk to me?”
    Once they were settled, he was less at home in the ocean than was Pisces Janet, and at one point swallowed so much water through his snorkel that he coughed fortwenty minutes. He’d always thought snorkeling—the renting of mouthpieces hundreds of other people had mouthed—was disgusting, like eating bowling shoes. But Janet seemed determined to get her money’s worth, so he swam along, one eye on her black bikini (she could compete with any twenty-five-year-old), and the other eye scanning the periphery for barracudas and sharks.
    At dinner they both ordered the mahi mahi, and as soon as the waiter was out of sight, she stared him down.
    â€œWhat,” she said, “is going on with you?”
    â€œNothing,” he said. He saw little bulbs of muscle at her jawline tense.
    â€œYou do realize there are all kinds of betrayals in a marriage,” she said. “Screwing the neighbor’s wife isn’t the only one.” A gull cawed in the distance, and she turned to the ocean. “You used to tell me everything,” she said.
    He sat perfectly still. She was right. He’d told her things he’d never told another living soul, things he knew she’d take with her to her grave. When they were first dating, they used to sleep together on his twin bed, and they could have fit two more people.
    But there was no way to explain this to her. After his mother, Janet was the most practical woman he’d ever met. She would laugh him out of the restaurant. She would think less of him.
    â€œIt’s a surprise,” he said. “You’ll see. You won’t want to have known in advance.”
    â€œI’d rather not be surprised,” Janet said, unswaddling her knife and fork from their napkin.
    The waiter arrived with the appetizers. “Well, you’re going to have to be,” said Felix.
    Back in their room, Janet stuck to her side of the bed and immediately went to sleep. All night long, while she slept beside him, he stared at the ceiling fan, as alert as if the cashews he’d eaten from the minibar had been fistfuls of espresso beans. The red numerals on the alarm clock seemed to quiver with life.
Something’s coming
, they said.
    The Monday he got back, the head of the firm called him into his office. “We had a problem while you were away,” he said. Felix felt a percussive rhythm in his chest. “Hackers got into our system. I’ll need you to draft a letter to all your clients explaining what has happened. And you should expect an internal audit of all your accounts.”
    In his head, Felix began scanning his data banks for possible humiliations. As unpleasant as it was to contemplate his boss reading every personal e-mail he’d ever written, he hadn’t done anything objectionable. At least, nothing he could think of. But he didn’t really want to think about it too much. Instead, he went into his office, closed the door, and began to work on the letter.
    While he set out to make a list of his cases with the most sensitive confidential information, that wasn’t the list he found himself composing.
Bartlett v. Johnson
vindictiveness, lying
Crump v. Orozco
stinginess, stonewalling
Mykytiuk v. Hydratia
greed, negligence, subsequent lying
    One of his most important clients was a company that was spending more money defending its toxic dumping than it would have cost to clean it up. He laid down his mechanical pencil and stared at the page. He didn’t recall having written the final three words, but there they were:
I hate this
.
    At the end of the week, he went to Bandera. Janet didn’t expect him until late on