Lucas

“Lucas!” During the Saturday game, Brian sneaks up on me on the sideline of the footie pitch in Lincoln Park and claps me on the back. I don’t like when the mums or dads stand beside me. I’m trying to focus on what my kids need, and the parents—especially the female parents—are usually focused on me. “How’s my boy doing?”

“Pretty good.” Actually, better than good. I’m not sure if it’s down to our chat, my yoga tips, or he’s got something else going on. Maybe telling him that it really doesn’t matter freed up his mind.

Max’s warning pops into my head for a very annoying visit. “So, Brian, we need to talk about something that’s come up.”

“With my case?”

“Yeah, with your case. It’s about Trinity.”

He stares at me. “What about her? Has she been bad-mouthing me?”

That he immediately went there irks me. That he’s right irks me more.

“Nothing that affects your situation.”

“Wait, how do you even know Trinity?”

“I met her at the bar where she works before I understood her connection to you. I was interested, but as soon as I realized who she was, I backed off.” Sort of.

“You’re interested in Trinity?”

“Is that so strange?”

His eyes have turned into dark, shiny, shifty buttons. “No. Well she’s older than you by what? Six years? Not exactly in the full bloom of youth, you know.”

Brian has strange ideas about what qualifies as the full bloom of youth. Oh yeah, he’s dumping his thirty-two-year-old wife for a nineteen-year-old nanny.

On the pitch, Denny Macklin is showing off with the ball instead of moving it into goal-scoring position. “Macker! Stop pissing about and get forward.” I mean, really.

I turn back to Brian. “Anyway, it’s no longer a consideration, because as soon as she found out I was representing you, she threw up her walls.”

He coughs out a laugh. “Sounds like Trinity. She’s not exactly the warm fuzzy type.”

This puts my back up, but I can’t defend her because it would sound like I have far too much skin in the game.

He’s still talking. “And Emily can barely make a decision without checking in with her sister first. It was always that way. Trinity’s just as responsible for the demise of my marriage.”

“She pushed you into having an affair?”

Brian scowls, and I’m happy to have earned it. “That’s merely a symptom. Any divorce lawyer worth his salt should know that. We had a lot of problems, plenty of them to do with Trinity interfering, telling Emily how bad of a husband I was. The affair…that only happened because Emily decided she wasn’t happy and started withholding. That was all her sister’s doing.”

Sure, my wife doesn’t understand me. Does he really think I haven’t heard a million variations of that hoary line?

“So.” Brian sniffs. “You want to bang her?”

Sometimes I represent scum. I’ve always been proud of my ability to treat all my clients the same regardless of how charmless they are. As Max is constantly telling me, everyone deserves a fair shake.

But Brian—or should I say, Trinity—has made this personal for me.

It’s been almost a week since I saw her. Once Chase was back home with his mom, my excuse to hang at Chez Jones no longer passed the smell test. But damn, I’d enjoyed playing house. I know I took advantage, but she let me in. I liked being on the inside where I could insinuate myself under her skin.

Holding her close in bed was like living in a dreamscape. She’d felt so soft and warm and I’d felt so hot and hard. (I know, feverish, on both sides.) And when she told me about her assault—about that fucker who made her feel unsafe—I wanted to hold her tight and never let go. But I knew if I stayed with her any longer I’d break every ethics rule in the book, so I eventually dragged my sorry arse to the sofa and shot for a couple of hours of shut-eye before my boys’ game last Saturday.

Brian’s query about my desire to bang Trinity is a woodpecker taunt in my head. What a prince.

“True, I wanted to date her, but I can’t because that would be a conflict of interest.” I will be saying those three fucking words on my deathbed. “Nothing has happened, although I should probably tell you that I gave Chase a ride to her place when he was staying there last weekend and I stuck around because she was sick and needed help.”

“Help? What kind of help?”

“Making dinner, dropping your son off at summer school, that kind of thing.”

His response is a little too long coming and emerges begrudgingly. “You did that for Chase?”

“Full service over here, Brian.”

“But nothing happened with Trinity?”

Something hot and jagged burns in my chest. Does my client have a thing for his sister-in-law? That’s all I bloody need.

“Nothing can happen. I’d have to either remove myself as your counsel or ask you to declare in writing that it’s okay.”

“Fuck, no. You’d need my permission?” His colorless eyes fill with imagined power. I understand now Trinity’s initial horror when I mentioned running any potential relationship by my client. The notion that Brian Carson, of all people, might have some say in who I can be with disgusts me.

I’m not about to hand this guy my balls on a silver platter. I’m not going to ask Brian Carson permission, which means I’m not going to do anything about Trinity.

This makes me both angry and sad.

“You’ve nothing to worry about, Brian. Nothing will happen with Trinity, so we’re all good.” I clap him on the back hard enough that he coughs.

The dominance might have shifted back to me, yet why do I feel completely and utterly powerless?

---

I rub my eyes, anxious to remove from them the remnants of my transatlantic flight. Larkvale is quiet. Always is on a Sunday.

I get a few nods of recognition. My chatty charm can wait until later. This quiet shadow world an hour outside London is waking up and no one’s quite ready for what I have to offer, not even me. I slip inside the cheerful room and take a seat in my familiar spot by the bed.

Lizzie’s hand seems thinner than two weeks ago, a bony claw covered in waxed paper. I give it a gentle squeeze, waiting for a response.

Always waiting.

For fifteen years my beautiful sister has lain prone in this bed, her every need attended to by angels wearing scrubs. I’ve not been the best brother. I send money. I visit when I can. Twice a month on a Saturday night, I trudge to O’Hare and take an overnight flight to London. I spend a few hours with her. Talk to her doctor and nurses. Make the staff at Larkvale laugh uproariously. The day ends with us all feeling better about ourselves.

Does Lizzie feel better? She knows I’m here. Her eyes follow me around like one of those haunted house paintings. Once they were bright and mischievous. Now they’re dark saucers, behind which her mind shifts in and out.

She’s in what the doctors describe as a minimally conscious state. She doesn’t speak, at least not verbally. But I know she hears and I know she answers me in her head.

Hi, bruv. ’Bout time you showed yer ugly mug.

She should be dead, according to the nurses. I overheard them once chatting about how it’s a miracle she’s lasted so long. Is there ever a more overused word than miracle? Forever thrown around like it’s the only option, like it’s this gossamer thread that tethers her to reality. Her body might be lacking, but her mind is still fighting to keep her in this world.

“Hey, Lizzie, it’s me.” Who else would it be? Certainly not her mother.

Reel it in, mate. She’s not here. She’s never here.

Before the indignant anger I usually keep for the courtroom can surface, Jenny, my favorite nurse, pops in with the flowers I brought in a vase.

“These are lovely! Much better than the petrol station ones some of the other residents get.”

“Yeah, I nicked them from some geezer’s garden on the way down from the city.”

She chortles, knowing I’m fibbing. The flowers cost me a bloody fortune, just one bloom in my ever-present bouquet of guilt.

“How’s she been?”

Jenny leans over and smooths a strand of dark hair on Lizzie’s forehead. “She had a bit of a cold last week—” At my look of concern, she speaks up to put me at ease. “Not bad enough to call you.”

“I can be on a plane immediately. Don’t think the fact I’m in another country would ever keep me away.”

“I know. We all know. But it wasn’t necessary. She’s fine now.”

Relatively.

I’m okay, LuLu. Just a case of the sniffles.

Three months ago, she developed a nasty chest infection that lingered. It was touch and go for a while, and there was a lot of checking in and mentions of paperwork. As her legal guardian, did I want to put a do-not-resuscitate order on record? I don’t want her to suffer if it comes to that, yet I’ll do my damnedest to hold on to her, even from across the pond.

And why do I lay my hat in Chicago when I could be here, closer to my sister, available at all hours when she has a cold?

A few years ago, the crushing weight of it all pushed me to a decision. Selfish, perhaps, but we’re all selfish creatures at heart. The change of scenery was necessary and I figured the bigger salary from the higher billable hours would assuage my guilt. Moving Lizzie into a private nursing facility with better care than the National Health Service would work for her. Reducing my visits to twice a month would work for me.

I slip Jenny and company a few quid every month to ensure Lizzie has someone doing the tasks I can’t, the little things outside of the basics of cleaning, feeding, and medicating her. Reading to her, mostly. And though she can’t play jigsaw puzzles anymore, Jenny plays for her.

In unspoken agreement, we both stand before the puzzle set up on the desk near the sunlit window. Another Harry Potter—Lizzie loves Harry—this one is about a third of the way done.

I grab a piece. “Yes!”

Jenny plays annoyed. “Ooh, you spotted it before me, you bugger!”

I slot it in, giving Harry a forehead and most important, his fateful scar.

“Don’t know how she could have missed that one, Lizzie. It’s his defining feature, right?”

Tee hee.

I love Lizzie’s laugh. It plays in my head when I’m down. Unbidden, I think of another woman’s giggle—a naughty, sexy one, all the more satisfying for the work it takes to earn it. What would Trinity think of Lizzie, and vice versa? I suspect they’d get along. Both brave, no-nonsense, take-no-guff women.

I wanted so badly to stay with her, come up to her place after the footie game and make dinner. Look after her. She needs looking after, does Trinity.

But I have a standing date with Lizzie.

Chatting with Brian yesterday placed my problem in stark relief. Trinity is a complication I can’t allow, not if I want to maintain my ethics, my job, and possibly, my sanity. Seeing Lizzie today confirms it. I don’t have the bandwidth to give a woman like Trinity what she needs.

“Well, I’ll leave you two to it,” Jenny says. “We got to chapter 18 of Deathly Hallows.”

“I caught up on the plane.” When I’m not here, I read the chapters I know the nurses cover so I’ll be ready to pick up when I visit. I pluck the book from the shelf, even though I have it on my e-reader. There’s something about holding the weighty tome that makes it feel like I’m doing something. Doing more.

One more chapter, bruv.

I take a seat and answer the request Lizzie made in my head.

“One more chapter, Lizzie.”