CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Cole
Houston, TX
Saturday night…
I sit in the living room of my penthouse hotel room in downtown Houston listening to Jane and Charlie, junior co-counsels on the case, sitting on either side of me arguing over points in my opening statement. I stand up and watch the floor-to-ceiling windows wrapping the open space, the sun beginning to dip beneath the horizon, red, yellow, and blue swirling together in a complex manner.
“He didn’t kill her,” Jane snaps at Charlie.
Her, being my client’s wife.
“He had blood all over his hands and face,” Charlie argues.
Jane makes a frustrated sound. Charlie is my age, Italian, vocal, and established. He loves to play devil’s advocate, which makes him one hell of a second chair. Jane is young, pretty, and needs to learn restraint. I’m not convinced she can control a courtroom. I catch myself on that one. Age isn’t the issue. She’s Lori’s age and Lori possesses extreme restraint and I have no doubt that she rules a courtroom when she’s present. The spanking was a mistake, at least that night, that cost me any future with Lori. I made her feel like I would demand the control she feels she needs.
“Of course he had blood on his face and hands,” Jane argues. “He ran to her and hugged her. He was frantic on the 911 call.”
I turn and face them. “He didn’t kill her,” I say. “And the blood he had all over him isn’t an indication of guilt, but innocence. No one who loves someone could leave them on the floor with a knife in their chest, and not pull it out and hold them close. And that’s exactly what I’m going to say in my opening statement.”
And I’m going to make it seem like I know what love is. I don’t. I only know this new obsession I have with Lori, but I’ll use that. She’ll help me with this case. She’ll allow me to connect to the passion a man would have for a woman he can’t bear to never see again. Something I have never felt ever in my life, until Lori. Perhaps it’s me wanting what I can’t have, the chase, and all that manly bullshit. Or maybe it’s her.
***
Lori
New York City, NY
I sit in Cat and Reese’s living room, listening as Reese’s team and Cat, who always helps him with his cases, as they debate the details on a case about to head to trial. The client is a woman who killed her husband, who beat her regularly, and there are witnesses, photos, and calls by neighbors to the police. The prosecution says that he threatened her family and so she slowly poisoned him. She says she didn’t do it. She loved him. She loved him desperately.
“You’re sure she didn’t do this, boss?” Elsa, one of Reese’s co-counsels asks, an older version of Cat’s blonde confident beauty. She sits in the chair to my left.
“I don’t represent guilty people,” Reese says, from an ottoman he’s pulled to the center of the room. “You know that. Next question.” When Reese says move on, in his intense attorney mode, you move on. He’s good-looking and tall, dark and handsome, funny at times, a bit like Cole, only different. Cole is different. I shake off that thought without further definition.
The man had another woman two nights ago. It’s time to forget him.
“What’s another source of the poison in question?” Richard asks, from the chair to my right. He’s the second co-counsel, who is handsome, confident, and currently running fingers through his longish wavy brown hair, as if thinking about his own questions.
“What about a food source?” Elsa says. “If we can find a food source high in that toxin, we can create reasonable doubt.”
“It might create doubt,” Cat says, shaking her head in the spot next to me, “or just come off desperate and farfetched.”
She’s right. It would, and I’m supposed to just be listening in, under a confidentiality employment agreement, of course, but I participate in my mind. I think of the person we’re defending and somehow that leads me to my father. He didn’t just make a bad financial investment with my uncle. The truth is he gambled, and got in trouble. His best friend at the time was in love with my mother and tried to get my father help, and her out, until he was cured. He ended up being painted as the enemy.
“It’s reasonable doubt,” Elsa argues. “If we get the jury asking what other source of toxin is in the food, we’ll nail this. Just get them thinking about pesticides with the data that shows how eroded our food is from them, and we kill this case.”
But it’s not a slam dunk, I think. Again, I go back to my father and his best friend and the connection clicks in my mind. Reese and his team are asking the wrong questions and giving the wrong answers. “Who loved her the way she loved him?” I blurt out before I can stop myself. “Who would kill for her?”
The entire room turns to look at me, Reese’s intense stare landing on me the hardest. And the man’s stare really is intense. Like Cole’s stare—intense, piercing, probing. A man of power who looks at you and pins you with his presence. “Continue with that thought,” he says.
“If you really believe she didn’t do this,” I say, “and obviously, you do, then that toxin got in his body by a human hand and intentionally. Who wanted to save her, and she wouldn’t let them?”
Reese stares at me a couple of more moments and then points a finger in the air. “This is it. We need to find that person and now. I’m going to see my client.” He looks at Cat. “I need you to work that magic you work to get people talking.”
“Of course,” Cat says, standing up.
Reese looks at me. “Help them chase this from here. And that interview Wednesday. You’ll have another recommendation from me before it takes place. I need to hire you.”
Cat squeezes my hand and gives me a smile. “I’ll call you when we leave her house.”
I nod, and Elsa and Richard look at me. Our debate and research begin, and it’s invigorating. I feel like I’m back at Stanford. I feel like I’m me again. A long time later, I stand at the floor-to-ceiling windows of Cat and Reese’s apartment, staring out over the pitch-black sky, speckled with New York City lights. My father wasn’t a Prince Charming, but he did love my mother and she loved him.
The truth is, without Cole, I might not be in touch with my version of Prince Charming enough to think through this case. It’s in the eyes of the beholder that we define our perfect fantasy. Cole gave me that for a night. I’m going to choose to block out the part where he was with another woman he was picking up at the same bar. Unless I see him again. Then, I’m pretty sure I’ll land a properly placed knee. Or unless that blood test says I’m pregnant. Then I’ll find him. Otherwise, he’ll have to find me, and since he’s moved on, that’s not going to happen.