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Harvey Kent spends most of his nights tending the town’s sports bar. The locals like him because he knows his customers’ orders before they do, and because he serves drinks with a slick grin and– if he likes you– a cleverly chosen movie quote.One afternoon, a customer from out of town asks, “Do I know you?”“Don’t think so, I have a good memory for faces.”Harvey doesn’t otherwise react, still polishing glasses, poker face perfect. He doesn’t have a face that a stranger would recognize. Maybe if he were a few pounds lighter, with brown eyes instead of green, with shorter hair and blonde highlights, with a broader forehead and two moles–Still, he stares down at the glass, angling himself away from her, waiting for her to look away.“Mr. Kent,” another woman calls from the other side of the bar. She’s eclectically dressed, in a purple trench coat and an ombré knitted scarf; her Afro frames her unmade-up face with a cloud of sleek curls. “Hit me.”“One gin and tonic coming up,” he says, rapidly putting down the glass and sweeping up a bottle, “for the best legal secretary in the city.”“In the town,” she corrects with an indulgent smile.Her smile turns downright knowing as the stranger pays her bill and walks out of the bar, as tension that only she could see melts from Harvey’s shoulders.She’s used to bailing him out.
Julia Kent is the best damn legal secretary in a no-name New England town with very few legal secretaries. Her boss is a harried, balding divorce lawyer who loses track of his billable hours on a daily basis; she spends her time reminding him not to miss deadlines, and to write up that divorce settlement, and to rehearse his opening statement so he doesn’t blank and start stuttering in open court again. He’s a kind man, who respects her work though her resume’s got only a high-school diploma, and he never asks too many questions.And if she could do all his work twice as well in half the time, she never says a thing.
“You’re really going to say nothing?”
“If you’re just planning to judge me, you can run right back to New York.”
Seated by a floor-to-ceiling window, Jessica Pearson glanced up at Harvey Specter as he paced around her apartment.
“This is illegal,” he said.
“You scared of that?”
“I’m scared for you, and you can’t blame me.”
She exhaled slowly, letting her head fall back against her chair, looking out at the glinting lights of Chicago. “This is the game now.”
Once a month the Kents play at a poker room off Route 1, a funny place with exposed beams and spotted wood walls and thin, garish carpet. They play at separate tables for the lowest stakes possible; they get fewer accusations of cheating that way.Nobody believes they can honestly win that much.
Julia frequents the sports bar where Harvey works. The other regulars ask them where they’re from, and they tell their sob story: they lived out in California and survived by day trading right up until they didn’t. The others try quizzing them about the markets, and they rattle off facts and figures and tales of corporate intrigue. It comes easily.“How’d you lose it all?”Julia tilts her head towards Harvey. “I let this one play unsupervised for a week.”“And you’re still together?”“If your marriage can’t survive one of you destroying absolutely everything you’ve ever worked for,” she says wryly, “is it really a marriage?”“In my defense, there were drugs involved,” Harvey chimes in, sending the whole bar into peals of laughter. Julia’s smiling too, though she tries to hide it by draining the rest of her drink.
They were high; nobody would bother taking them down for minor drug crimes, and god knows they wouldn’t get any sleep otherwise. Usually marijuana made them cocky, made Harvey into an over-bold adolescent and Jessica into more of a majestic empress, but tonight there was no strength in the line of her shoulders as she sat, idly running her fingers through his hair as he slumped against her, utterly drained of energy.
“You’re still going to say nothing?”
Though she stayed silent he knew what she was thinking; they had the same image burned on their eyelids of a young activist’s body burned beyond recognition.
“You knew they were coming for her.”
“I didn’t do anything illegal.”
Finally he craned his head up, eyes wide and sad. “I can’t stay if you keep quiet, but god, Jessica. Don’t make me go.”
Harvey comes home just before 12 one night and lets himself into a skinny shingled townhouse. It’s pastel yellow on the outside and still unpainted on the inside, only primer on the bare white drywall. A few quirky decorations are scattered through the house– sculptures and abstract paintings Harvey picked up from the local farmer’s market.There are no photographs in the entire house.Julia’s in the living room, stretched out on a black leather sofa and watching a massive plasma TV. She glances up when Harvey enters.“Damn overtime,” Harvey snorts, dropping his wallet and keys on the kitchen counter. “Eleven p.m., that’s got to be breaking labor laws.”“I’m shocked you put up with it,” she replies. Though a stranger might miss the irony in her words, he laughs outright.Then he pours himself a glass of wine– twenty dollars for the whole bottle, thank god he’s not drinking for the flavor– and comes over to the living room. She curls her feet in, giving him space to sit on the sofa with her, though there’s a perfectly serviceable armchair just a foot away.He glances at the screen and scoffs. “Really? We’re giving this another shot?”Julia nods, and with a sigh he settles in for another episode of a legal-drama-cum-soap-opera. They make it halfway through the “Previously On” before the heckling begins.“Have these writers ever read the Constitution?”“Have these writers ever read?” Harvey retorts.When the plot goes rapidly off the rails, Julia holds out her hand, and Harvey immediately passes his wine glass over. She sips it and rolls her eyes. “Why is the managing partner endorsing insider trading?”“To be fair, I did that once.”“What?”“Don’t worry, it didn’t work.”She gives him a look.They try to keep up the teasing, making fun of the sham of a corporate law firm, the city that’s only a shadow of New York, but the complaints start to stick in their throats. They switch it off halfway through.Despite their kvetching, it’s a decent show. It’s too painful for them to watch.
“Harvey, you are officially a traitor.”That’s what patrons shout at him on game nights at the bar, even though he’s serving their drinks. It’s the only plausible response to a turncoat who dares root for the Yankees in Red Sox territory.“Julia, tell me you’re sane at least?” pleads one of the other customers.She replies with a diplomatic shrug and a claim of neutrality. “Baseball was never my game.”
“You’re turning traitor, you know that?” That’s what Mayor Novak warned in his favorite isolated parking lot, the night after Jessica took her first step out of line.
She maintained her stony silence, but Harvey straightened up in the shadows behind her. “She’s doing what’s right. So am I.”
“You can try,” Novak replied with a sneer, “but you’re not going to get anywhere.”
“You threatening us?” Harvey stepped forward, menacing.
“Not me,” he said, standing his ground with a hard little smile. “I was never the one you needed to worry about.”
Harvey wakes up before her most days. There are woods across the road from their house, and before breakfast he puts one earbud in and goes for a run. He’s long since picked out a favorite trail, quiet and far from the road, the trees blazing red and gold in the autumn.When Julia gets up in the morning, she makes herself coffee and reads the news and goes out for a run herself. Most days she stays along the road, jogging to the center of town and back, but occasionally she heads down Harvey’s trail instead. She’s much faster on her feet; whenever she tries the woods, she catches up to him, gives him a friendly nod, and then proceeds to outstrip him easily.When she runs into him today he’s not moving. Instead he’s standing against a tree trunk, doubled over and breathing hard, hand pressed against a stitch in his side.“You okay?”“Yeah,” he says hoarsely. “Well. You know.”She looks down the trail but doesn’t keep going.Harvey frowns at her. “You’ll be late for work.”She steps off the path and joins him, leaning against the same tree, stretching her legs. “I’m fine right here.”
Harvey’s hair has gone back to dark brown. He wears it without gel– without brushing it, some days.Julia’s hair is starting to gray. When he’s being particularly incorrigible, she takes a silver ringlet, pulls at it until it’s straight and tells him, “See what you’ve done?”He always replies with a mischievous smile, not even trying to shift the blame.When Julia visits him at the bar, all the other patrons laugh at their patter, a mix of arguments they don’t mean and endearments they pretend not to mean either. One night the woman sitting next to Julia asks how long they’ve been together.“I’ve put up with him for seventeen years,” Julia tells her.“Oh, of course.” The woman nods sagely. “It was either that or new love.”Glancing over, Harvey asks why she thinks that. She has to ponder it for a moment.“It’s the way you look at her,” she finally says, “even when she’s not paying attention.”Harvey starts in on some witty retort, probably claiming that he could just be the best actor she’s ever seen, faking devotion for the sake of domestic peace, but outside there’s a crack, the sound of a car backfiring. He and Julia freeze.
Jessica supposed she’d practically married Harvey the first time she saw him. After a single meeting, she’d pledged to put him through Harvard Law and save him a place at her side forevermore, and in return he was more faithful to her than her actual husband. Harvey had even followed her to Chicago, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.
And so she ignored her own weariness, the fact that she was swaying on her feet, the five phone calls from Jeff begging her to run. She argued with the nurses who tried to pull her away– “only family allowed,” hell with that– and stayed by Harvey’s side right until they pulled him into surgery and from the second after he came out.
There had been two cracks, two sounds of a gun firing. The first bullet missed, burying itself in the wall right behind Jessica. The second one would have buried her had Harvey not thrown himself in front, taking the hit in the side of his torso.
(To love and to cherish her.)
Jessica Pearson was not a particularly religious woman; she preferred not to put her faith in beings higher than herself. That night she prayed, both her hands clasped around one of his.
“I screwed up this check.”Harvey tears another one out the checkbook, and without a word he trades it for the half-signed check currently in Julia’s hands. He shreds the old one, destroying any trace of another name.
“Jessica Specter.”
She practiced the name and found it oddly natural on her tongue, though she likely wouldn’t keep it for long.
“Harvey Pearson-Specter.”
Now that was a thing of beauty.
“So let me get this right,” Harvey rasped on his hospital bed, still high on the pain meds for the stitches in his side. “I’m the one who got shot, but I’m still ineligible for witness protection.”
“That’s what the Marshals say,” she confirmed. “I’m the one with the testimony, and I’m who the mob was aiming for.”
“But when you turn I’m the obvious next target.”
“The Marshals protect witnesses and their immediate family members. Unfortunately being the best friend of the witness does not qualify you for the program.”
“Best friend?” Harvey repeated hopefully.
“That’s what you took from that sentence?”
He snorted. “Fine. So you’ll leave, and I’ll try not to get shot at.”
His voice broke a little. She couldn’t tell which clause caused it.
“That’s not the only option.”
It took him a moment to grasp what the other option might be, and another moment to puzzle out whether she really meant that or if there was some third path here that he was missing. His face cartwheeled through a hilarious series of expressions, but he schooled it back into place before quoting, “You’re gonna go get the papers, get the papers?”
She burst out in a laugh. “Oh, that’s romantic.”
“You don’t need me to tell you how wonderful I think you are.” His smile was mischievous and soft all at once, and she would have attributed it to the meds if he hadn’t spent over a decade looking at her that way.
She left soon afterwards– though only after checking in with the security she had hired from out of town– to go get the papers. An Illinois marriage license.
It’s Valentine’s Day.They didn’t celebrate last year. It’s not as if they were really lovers, genuinely married. It wasn’t their day, and if they ended up at what passed for an upscale restaurant that night it was only because of the holiday special, two lobster rolls for the price of one.This year they still don’t give proper gifts. No chocolate truffles, no flowers, but then they wouldn’t stoop so low even if they were really lovers.Instead, when Harvey comes up the stairs, Julia starts playing a CD. It’s burned with an eclectic mix of songs, with few similarities between them; an outsider wouldn’t notice any unifying feature besides the fact that they’re all jazz. But all Harvey hears is the sweet sax in the background, familiar in more ways than one, threading through every song on the list. His eyes well up, though he tries in vain to hide it as he sits down beside her.“I won’t judge you horribly if you got me nothing,” she says with a smile that she likes to think is more magnificent than smug.He throws an entirely smug smirk back at her. “You haven’t looked in the cabinets, have you?”She raises her eyebrow, but he doesn’t give an inch. Rolling her eyes she rises and checks the cabinets herself–And finds an exquisite bone china tea set. It’s not exactly the same as the one she kept in the office, the one they drank from so many times back when she was a senior partner checking in on her wayward personal associate, imparting all her wordly wisdom. These cups might just be even lovelier.They’re not really lovers, but she can’t really stop the tears in her eyes either.
They search for legal news out of a mix of morbid curiosity and masochism. While they obfuscate their opinions in public– “I heard the Cabinet could invoke the twenty-first amendment, or is it the twenty-fifth?”– at home they are precise and political and vicious. They watch the news and alternate between cheering for and shouting at the lawyers parading across their TV, and they spend hours untangling strategies and motivations, guessing at hidden evidence. Eventually, they make a game of it, placing bets on motions and verdicts, trading household chores between themselves.Julia makes it to court every couple weeks, dropping files off when her boss forgets them at the office, but C-SPAN is the closest Harvey gets to important legal decision-making nowadays.He’s red-eyed, up late into the night, staring as Congress blathers on and overlooks blatant perjury. “We could have run circles around them.”“Do you regret not being there?”She asks the question artlessly, not even looking over at him, as if she hasn’t spent weeks working out the phrasing. She’s left him an out. He can artfully answer that it’s a moot point, because the mob would have made sure that he never made it to D.C. or even to New York if he hadn’t stayed with her.What he says is, “Not for a second.”
The railroad’s clear on the other side of town, but the town’s small enough that they still hear the Amtrack trains clanging through in the dead of the night. The noise wakes Julia; she sits up in the master bedroom and listens to the blaring horn, closing her eyes tight, trying to compare it to the sound of a siren. She’s never found the similarity.Still there’s the creak from the guest room door down the hall, and she holds her breath. There’s a 75% chance Harvey’s about to dive into the bathroom on his right and lock the door in the hopes that it’ll hide the sound of retching. There’s a 25% chance he’ll instead turn to the left and go downstairs, reaching past a porcelain tea set to the scotch.Instead she hears tentative steps forward, forward, pausing just outside her door. She waits for his move and stays quiet, holding her breath, listening for a question or a knock.There’s only silence as he waits for her move.“Come in.”He does, opening the door slowly as if he’s afraid he imagined the invitation, and he exhales with relief when he finds her sitting up in bed. “Sorry I woke you–““Don’t.”He stands there a moment, still waiting for her direction. She doesn’t say anything more, simply reaches over and folds up the corner of the covers. He slips in beside her, the mattress dipping slightly, and curls up on his side.A moment later she shifts towards him so there are mere inches between them, and then tension melts away as he relaxes back against her.She folds her arm around him, resting her hand on his.They stay there for a few minutes, breathing quietly. Finally he breaks the silence.“Jessica,” he murmurs, “I think I have a problem.“She pauses. “You do?”“. . . I’m starting to like the Red Sox this season.”They start laughing low, low and gentle in the darkness.
“You understand what you’re signing up for, Harvey?”
“Spending the rest of my life as an average schnook, I got it.”
“You sure?”
The U.S. Marshals whisked them away hours after Jessica testified, and she expected Harvey to bow out at any moment. Sure, it was dangerous for him out in the world, but he could always leave the country, throw money at the mob, denounce her and pretend they had no real relationship so no one would hurt her through him. She was the one with the gun to her head, and to use his idiom he was the one with 147 other options. He was the one who could still keep his name, his life.
He stayed.
They flew down to D.C. and got into a car with blacked-out windows and rode for hours, probably in circles for some of it. Once they were hopelessly lost, they got out and entered the WITSEC compound, where they would prepare for the fraud that would consume the rest of their lives. The psychiatrists prescribed pills for Harvey, while the officers suggested some strategic plastic surgery, enough to minimize the chances that facial recognition software would blow their cover. The two of them talked over the new surname; Jessica had to talk Harvey out of both “Wayne” and “Close” before settling for “Kent.” Then they worked out their new backstory, electing to pose as solo traders who fell on hard times; they were familiar enough with the world of finance to withstand questioning, and the cover could plausibly explain why they didn’t have resumes or career histories or any internet presence.
They would pretend that they never worked for anyone but themselves, never relied on anyone but each other.
The Marshals tested them inside-out on their new selves, made them practice writing their new names for hours on end. They encouraged them to take bits and pieces of their real history and weave it into their new identities, to ease the transition and reduce the chances that they’d get caught contradicting themselves. They interrogated the pair for days on end.
Still, they never detected the second layer of fraud.
Jessica and Harvey had worked out all the details themselves back in Chicago. Because the best lies are based in truth they aimed to invent as little as possible. It was oddly easy to write their history into a love story.
“First time we had sex?” he asked.
“New Year’s Day, 2008.”
“So you can blame it on the pot. Convenient.”
“First time we flirted?”
“I can’t remember a time when we weren’t flirting.”
“Neither can I.”
“How did we have sex the first time?” When she glared at him, he feigned innocence. “It’s a valid question, they might check if our stories match up. Unless you want them to declare me ineligible . . .”
“Jesus Christ.”
“So how would I get into your bed, huh?”
She spun him an elaborate story, just as he requested, and pretended she came up with it on the spot.
The town’s positive the Kents are in love– they prove it with every little inside joke, every knowing smile– but as couples go they’re not publicly demonstrative with their affection. Maybe they’re worried about hidden prejudice, or maybe they’re just private that way.Harvey’s pouring drinks and entertaining the crowd as always, on a Friday night when everyone’s whining about the offices they just left and trying to figure out how the hell they got stuck in their current jobs. Julia watches the chaos and laughs with them all like they’re old friends, though she doesn’t talk much about herself.“Why stay in law?” Harvey had asked in the early days. “Why not move on?”“I’m not leaving that much of myself behind,” she answered. “How about you? How can you just drop it?”“I was always in it for you,” he told her.So she doesn’t joke about her own job today, instead staying careful and quiet, sipping her ten-dollar scotch whiskey and counting her blessings. Harvey’s larger than life tonight; he rules this bar as much as any courtroom back in the golden days, eliciting stories from his patrons and calling them on their contradictions and making everyone cry– with laughter though, that makes a difference. It’s impossible not to love him.“So Harvey,” another guy calls out, “how’d you end up as our local Sam Malone, huh?”“This one,” he answers, pointing at Julia.“Oh, so it’s my fault?” she retorts.“You don’t remember?” he says with a cheeky smile. “You said I belonged in the bar.”Everyone’s amused by that, but they’re not sure why Julia’s face splits into a brilliant grin, why she bursts out laughing, mouth wide open, head thrown back like it’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard. His smile grows too as he comes over and leans in towards her, arms crossed on the counter. Maybe she’s tipsier than they thought. He starts laughing too, and maybe he’s drunk on her.She bends forward for just a second, just as long as it takes to kiss him.He pauses. A hundred expressions flit across his face, his eyes locked on hers and alight with surprise and wonder. She looks steadily back at him, less surprised but equally joyous. There’s a whole conversation there no one else will ever hear.“Harvey? Another gin, please.”“Anything for you, Mrs. Kent.”