The second morning began with a lie.
"Good morning, Mr. Storm. This is the front desk. You requested a four a.m. wake-up call for the next four days."
Alex sat on the edge of the bed, phone pressed to his ear, eyes clear. He had been awake since three.
"Consider it confirmed," he said. "Same time tomorrow."
He ended the call and set the phone down. The room was dark except for the thin line of streetlight cutting under the curtains. He sat very still, listening—to the muted hiss of climate control, to the weight of his own breathing, to the faint throb of the city waking up around him.
Four days.
Yesterday had been reconnaissance. Today, the work began.
He showered, dressed, and tied his tie with the same exact knot he had worn in his last life's final trial. Superstition would have called it tempting fate. Alex called it leverage—the kind he exerted on himself. Memory was a blade; carried properly, it kept you sharp.
He checked his reflection. The man in the mirror no longer looked like a stranger trying on someone else's suit. The posture had settled. The eyes had decided.
"You have four days," he told his reflection quietly. "Don't waste any of them."
He slipped his notebook into his jacket, palmed the keycard, and headed out.
By 5:15 a.m., he was standing in the marble lobby of a building that did not yet know it was temporary in his life. The gym on the third floor was 24 hours. He had zero interest in treadmills and every interest in overheard conversations.
High achievers talked at dawn.
Inside, the air smelled of rubber mats, sweat, and faint eucalyptus. A news channel flickered silently on a mounted TV, the ticker crawling under images of politicians whose names meant less to him than the judges behind them.
Alex hit the rowing machine, headphones in, volume off. Cardio gave him cover to watch the morning's first wave—finance guys, junior associates, one woman in a Pearson Hardman staff jacket who spent ten minutes on a stationary bike complaining into her phone about document review assignments.
"…sixteen-hour days and I still get talked over in meetings," she muttered, breathless, pedaling. "No, Mom, I'm not coming home. This is still better than family law in Queens."
Alex smiled faintly. Every complaint was data.
By 6:30, he had cataloged three names, two gripes, and one offhand mention of "Specter getting away with murder again," which he stored away like a file marked for later review.[wikipedia +1]
At 7:10, he walked two blocks east to a different café than the one from yesterday. Routine bred patterns; patterns attracted attention. He preferred to be the one doing the watching.
This café sat closer to the tower where Pearson Hardman's partners looked down on the rest of Manhattan like they owned the air. The barista knew at least two regulars by name and drink within the first hour. Both were associates from the firm. Both spoke too loudly.
"Harvey pulled another miracle last night," one said, dropping into a chair, laptop already open. "Guy settles at the last minute for double what we thought. I swear he's got blackmail on half the city."[youtube +1]
"Or he's just Harvey," the other replied. "I'd sell my soul to work on one of his cases."
"Careful," the first said. "He might actually have a form for that."
They laughed. Alex did not.
There it was again—the name, spoken with the reluctant admiration reserved for those who stood at the apex of a system everyone else was still climbing. Harvey Specter. Jessica's closer. Pearson Hardman's golden hammer.[wikipedia +1]
Exactly the kind of man the universe liked to set opposite him.
Alex finished his coffee and closed his notebook. He had seen enough for the morning. The entry point was obvious, and it was not through some HR portal or cattle-call interview. That would be a waste of his time and an insult to his skills.
If he wanted into Pearson Hardman at the level he deserved, there were only two doors that mattered: Jessica Pearson's office and Harvey Specter's radar.
Jessica required evidence. Harvey required impact.
He could give both.
By nine, he was in a Midtown law library, the kind that rented time by the hour to lawyers whose firms were either too cheap or too small to maintain their own research stacks. Floor-to-ceiling shelves, silent tables, the faint smell of paper and ambition.
He did not need the books; he needed the database access.
His credentials—Alex J. Storm, licensed, admitted, and perfectly legitimate—logged him into a universe of case law. He did not look up statutes. He looked up people.
Judges with a history of ruling in favor of Pearson Hardman's clients. Judges who had ruled against them. Opposing counsel who had lost to Harvey Specter and then, in some cases, never recovered professionally. The pattern was clear: when Pearson Hardman engaged fully, they did not just win cases. They reshaped opposing careers.[wikipedia +1]
Good.
He also pulled up everything he could find on a name that had stayed in his mind since his first night in this reality: Daniel Hardman.
Articles. Court filings. Whispered commentary in legal blogs. The picture that emerged was one of a man who preferred shadows to spotlights. Money moved. Funds shifted. Ethics bent just enough to squeak.[suits.fandom +1]
Pearson's name came up again and again as the counterweight. The managing partner who had forced Hardman out. The woman who had held the firm together with equal parts brilliance and ruthlessness.[rltblog.home +1]
Alex leaned back in his chair, eyes on the scrolling screen, mind already a few steps beyond it.
There it was. The fault line.
Pearson Hardman was not a monolith. It was a delicate balance of power and reputation, of public narrative and hidden rot. Hardman's shadow still existed in the minds of clients, competitors, and likely at least one senior partner who thought the name on the wall meant something different than Jessica did.
A firm that outwardly prided itself on strength but inwardly still guarded a wound was a firm that might listen to someone who offered both protection and advantage.
He closed the laptop.
On his way out, his phone buzzed with a calendar reminder he had set for himself:
Prep pitch – Day 2.
His pitch was not a résumé. It was a proposition:
You have power. You have enemies. You have vulnerabilities. Hire me, and I turn the last one into a weapon instead of a weakness.
By noon, he was back near 601 Lexington, this time not in a café but on a bench with a clear line of sight to the street entrance. Yesterday had been about faces. Today was about rhythm.
Traffic in and out showed patterns. Partners emerged later than associates. Lunch runs clustered. Errands rotated. And in the space of an hour, he watched something that told him exactly how to infiltrate the firm without waiting for permission.
He saw her.
The red hair appeared first, bright even under a gray sky. She stepped out of the building without breaking stride, wearing heels that clicked confidently on wet pavement and a coat that somehow stayed immaculate despite the weather. A man in an expensive suit said something to her at the door; she responded without looking at him, a half-smile, half-lasered dismissal that made the man laugh and retreat at the same time.
Donna Paulsen.
He did not need a nametag to confirm it. The posture, the control, the way people adjusted around her as though she exerted gravity—that was all the ID he required.[youtube +1]
She walked like someone who knew every security code, every backdoor, every secret that kept a skyscraper like this humming safely.
She headed east, cutting across the street, and Alex rose without thinking. He followed—not close enough to be obvious, not far enough to lose her in the crowd. He watched her glance at her watch, adjust her route, take a side street that bypassed a clogged crosswalk entirely. Efficient. Predictive.
She ducked into a small, high-end deli halfway down the block. He counted to ten, then went in after her.
Inside, the place was a carefully curated chaos of smells—fresh bread, cured meats, too-expensive coffee. A line snaked toward the counter. Donna stood in it, scrolling on her phone, occasionally looking up and scanning the room.
Alex stepped into the line three people behind her.
Now came the important part: he did nothing.
Some men would have tried to engineer an encounter—bump into her, spill coffee, open with a clever line. He had interrogated witnesses with more caution than that. For someone like Donna, transparency was the only gambit that might not insult her.
He let the moment breathe. He studied the board, the menu, the way staff interacted with her when she reached the front.
"Morning, Donna," the guy behind the counter said, already assembling something before she opened her mouth.
"That's dangerously presumptuous," she replied, but the smile in her voice made it clear she did not mind. "And correct."
"That's what you pay us for," he said, ringing her up.
"I pay you because my boss has a god complex and if he doesn't get food on time, he starts rewriting the Old Testament," she said dryly. "The fact that you're psychic is just a bonus."
Harvey.
Alex tucked the word away, even as something in his chest tightened—not with jealousy, but with recognition. The intimacy between long-term professional allies was like a signature. Donna spoke about Harvey like someone who knew his rhythm better than he knew it himself.[collider +1]
She stepped aside, waiting for her order.
The line moved. Alex reached the counter and glanced at the menu once, more out of politeness than need.
"What can I get you?" the server asked.
"The same as hers," Alex said.
Donna's head turned, just slightly.
The server blinked. "You sure? It's… specific."
"I trust her judgment," Alex said. "She looks like someone who doesn't waste time on bad decisions."
Donna's attention fully shifted to him now. Her eyes—sharp, assessing, amused—took him in from shoes to hair. It was not a flirtatious look. It was an audit.
"You know," she said, "most people just ask what someone's having instead of making sweeping character assessments."
"That would be intrusive," Alex replied. "And inaccurate if you lied."
"You think I'd lie about a sandwich?"
"I think you'd lie about something else just to see if I'd believe you," he said. "The sandwich is incidental."
A slow smile curved her mouth. It did not reach her eyes, but it nodded in their direction.
"You a therapist or something?" she asked.
"Something," he said.
Her gaze narrowed. "You said that like a man who hasn't figured out his cover story yet."
The server handed her a bag. She took it without looking away from Alex.
"And you said that like a woman who already knows everyone in a ten-block radius," he replied.
"You're not in my radius," she said. "I'd remember you."
He accepted that as fact. "Give it time."
She studied him for half a heartbeat longer, then gave a little shrug that said she had decided he was interesting but not immediately dangerous.
"Here's the thing about time," Donna said. "Around my office, people either use it to get ahead or waste it and get eaten alive."
"Which category are you in?"
"I'm the one who makes sure the people who matter don't fall into either," she said. "Have a good day, Mr…?"
"Storm," he said. "Alex Storm."
The name landed between them like a card on a table.
Donna's eyes flicked over his face once more, as if storing it in a mental file. Then she pivoted, walked out, and was gone.
He let out a breath he had not realized he was holding.
She had not asked where he worked, and he had not volunteered. That was good. He had no interest in presenting himself as a supplicant from the outside. When he walked into Pearson Hardman, he wanted it to feel like a continuation of a story already in motion, not a cold approach.
He took his identical order back to his bench and ate without really tasting it. His mind replayed the conversation, each inflection, each glance.
Donna was exactly what his research had suggested and more: perceptive, confident, allergic to nonsense. She had looked at him and seen a variable she had not accounted for. Not a threat, not yet, but not noise either.
Perfect.
By afternoon, Alex had built the skeleton of his strategy.
Day 2: Establish outside presence and credibility.
Day 3: Create the perfect problem.
Day 4: Solve it in a way that leaves Pearson Hardman with only one logical response—hire him.
The problem needed to be real, not manufactured. Manufactured crises left paper trails. Real ones left scars. Pearson Hardman already had a scar: Daniel Hardman's legacy and the quiet, ongoing efforts to keep it from reopening.[suits.fandom +2]
If he could anticipate a threat to the firm's reputation before they did and neutralize it in a way that made them look stronger, he would not be a candidate. He would be a necessity.
The threat presented itself sooner than expected.
At 3:40 p.m., sitting in a different café with a different angle of the same building, Alex noticed a man he had not seen before. Mid-forties. Expensive suit that did not quite fit his sloppier posture. He stood across the street from Pearson Hardman, phone in hand, snapping photos of everyone who went in and out.
Not casually—systematically.
Reporters had tells. Disgraced former associates did too. This man had both: the hungry gaze of someone chasing a story, the bitterness of someone who had once been inside the glass and now stood firmly outside.
Curious, Alex paid his bill and crossed the street, approaching from an angle that offered him a glimpse of the man's phone screen.
An email draft was open:
Subject line: Pearson Hardman's Untouchable Closer?
Body: …anonymous sources allege past misconduct, cover-ups, and embezzlement tied to the firm's founding partner, with current senior partners complicit in—
Alex filed the fragments. Even without names, the implications were obvious. Hardman. Pearson. The kind of scandal that, if framed correctly, could drag Harvey's cases through the mud by association.[rltblog.home +2]
Perfect.
"Looking for the right angle?" Alex said mildly.
The man startled, then scowled. "Beat it."
Alex did not. "Hard to get a clean shot from here. Reflection off the glass, people moving too fast."
"Yeah, thanks, I've done this before," the man snapped. "Who are you, their PR?"
"Not yet," Alex said.
The man hesitated. "You work for Pearson Hardman?"
"I work for outcomes," Alex said. "Sometimes those align with law firms. Sometimes they align with people trying to tear them down. You look like you're aiming for the second."
"Why do you care?"
"Because sloppy stories make bad precedent," Alex replied. "And you're about to write a very sloppy story."
The reporter's eyes flashed. "I've got sources. Real ones. People who worked there. People who saw things."
"I'm sure you do," Alex said. "But if you lead with embezzlement allegations tied to a founding partner whose misconduct was already dealt with internally, and you try to pin complicity on current management without concrete evidence, you don't get a Pulitzer. You get a lawsuit and a retraction."[wikipedia +2]
The man sneered. "You sound awfully sure for someone who claims not to work for them."
Alex studied him, weighing probabilities. Former associate was still the most likely, but burned vendor was not off the table. Either way, the man wanted two things: validation and revenge.
Alex could use both.
"I'm sure because I read," Alex said. "And because the judges in this district are not fond of reporters who try to turn 'anonymous sources' into evidence. You publish something that broad without documentation, Pearson Hardman hits you with defamation, and you spend the next two years fighting motions instead of chasing stories."
The man looked away, jaw clenched. "Maybe that's worth it."
"Is it?" Alex asked quietly. "Or would it be more satisfying to publish something that sticks?"
Silence stretched between them.
"What are you proposing?" the man finally asked.
"Context," Alex said. "You want to go after a giant? Fine. But you don't swing randomly at the armor. You find the seam. You build a case. You make sure your first shot doesn't just bounce off and make them look bulletproof."
He glanced at the phone. "You've got pieces. You don't have a story. Not yet."
The reporter narrowed his eyes. "And you're going to help me?"
Alex smiled thinly. "I'm going to help you not waste your chance."
And in doing so, he would do something else: steer the arc of the story toward a resolution that made Pearson Hardman look cleaner, stronger, and more transparent than the rumor mill wanted them to be.
He spent the next hour walking the man—who eventually introduced himself as Liam—through the basics of building a legally defensible exposé without crossing into libel. He pointed out gaps in Liam's sources, suggested avenues that would lead not to Jessica's leadership but to Daniel Hardman's already-documented misconduct, and emphasized the value of records over whispers.[suits.fandom +2]
"You're basically helping me write a hit piece on them," Liam said at one point, suspicious.
"I'm helping you write something true," Alex said. "If that hits them, they'll deserve it. If it doesn't, then you just did the city a favor by clearing their name instead of smearing it."
The key was simple: Liam thought he was being cleverly guided toward a bigger story. In reality, Alex was quietly channeling every potential explosive detail toward historical misconduct already on public record, and away from the current regime.[wikipedia +1]
Control the narrative before it controlled him.
By the time they parted, Liam had agreed—reluctantly—to hold off on publishing anything for seventy-two hours while he corroborated documents and followed the breadcrumbs Alex had strategically scattered.
Seventy-two hours.
Three days.
"Why are you doing this?" Liam asked as they shook hands.
"Because I like the truth," Alex said. "And because chaos is bad for business."
"Your business?"
"Everyone's."
Liam walked away, already dialing a number, voice rising with renewed purpose.
Alex turned back toward Pearson Hardman.
He had just created the perfect problem: a potential scandal brewing that would surface old wounds but could, if handled correctly, burn them out instead of reigniting them.
Tomorrow, he would walk into the building and offer Jessica Pearson the solution—before she even knew the full shape of the threat.
Four days left.
Harvey Specter did not know his name yet. Donna Paulsen had only heard it once.
That was about to change.