Lucas

We head over to Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder Company right after the game (we lost 6–1). The guys are feeling dejected, but that’ll soon change when I stuff their sad little faces with pizza and Coke.

Not all the kids can make it—just five of them, as most have other activities on their jam-packed agendas. American kids’ lives are scheduled up the wazoo, I’ve noticed. No worries, though, I’m fine with the numbers, and I’m especially fine with my cochaperone who has agreed to drop off half the kids after.

The pizza place is historic because it might have been used as a lookout point for the St. Valentine’s Day massacre across the street in 1929. Built into the basement of a town house in tony Lincoln Park, it’s small and doesn’t take reservations. But I know the owner, Reggie, and he’s set aside a six-seater booth at the back.

“Kind of a tight squeeze, Reggie.” Not that I object to tightly squeezing anywhere with Trinity. At which point Reggie, who is clearly a man after my own heart, directs Trinity and me to a separate table in the corner. Brilliant.

Trinity looks like this is less than brilliant. “But—” Flustered, she waves a hand over the kids, who are busy crowding into the booth. Carlos and Chase on one side, Sam, Jonah, and Shawn on the other. “We have to sit with the children. To watch them.”

“Who’s chaperoning who now, Trinity?”

“Pretty sure it’s whom,” she says, taking the seat I hold for her.

“Sure thing, Ms. Grammarian. And don’t worry. I’ll watch the little shits with the hawk eyes I’m not allowed to use on you. Because. Ethics.”

She doesn’t want to smile, but she’s helpless in the face of my charm. By the time this divorce is settled, we’ll be so ready. The hottest slow burn in history.

Trinity’s looking around, so I take this opportunity to study her. She’s wearing ripped jeans and a white T-shirt that contrasts beautifully with her skin. Her bra is lacy, a fact of which I’m acutely aware because it creates an embossed pattern where her gorgeous tits press against the erotically thin fabric.

“Okay, guys,” I call out to the team. “Let’s get our orders in for pizza pot pies because they take awhile to bake.”

“Pizza pot pies?” Trinity asks with fitting amazement. “That sounds awesome.”

“You have no idea, Ms. Jones.”

Chase shoots me a look, then catches his aunt’s eye. Something is communicated between them, then Trinity frowns at me as if to say I need to knock it off. A little harmless flirting won’t breach any code of ethics here. Of this I’ve been convincing myself since day one.

Once our orders are in, Trinity goes straight for the bread, immediately followed by the jugular. “So why divorce law?”

“Are you one of those people who think lawyers are scum and divorce lawyers are the scum on the scum?”

“No. But I saw those diplomas in your office. You graduated early from a very prestigious university in England. You moved away from where you were raised and made your life in another country. You’ve dedicated your career to fathers’ rights. I think you’re the kind of guy who could do anything he puts his mind to, yet you’ve chosen to do this. Divorce. Custody battles. A specialty that deals in a very unique branch of hurt. I’m guessing some guys do it for the money, but you could probably make more in personal injury law or something corporate. You have reasons that mean something significant to you.”

Well, then. I’ve never had anyone cut to the heart of it like that. To the heart of me. Her insight deserves an honest response.

“My parents divorced when I was eight. Dad was a mild-mannered accountant by day and, well, a mild-mannered accountant by night. Boring as fuck, the kind of bloke who liked his hard-boiled eggs done for exactly three minutes and his underpants dry-cleaned with medium starch. I loved him to bits. He was smart, my dad. And when my mum divorced him, it destroyed him. Destroyed us, because we should have stayed with him.”

How he and my mother ever survived eight and a half years of marriage I’ll never know. She was a wild child who thought she could settle down once my dad knocked her up after a one-night stand. He adored her, you see. Stepping up was never not an option for him.

“So you fight for dads who you think get the shaft from the system?”

“You could say that. I mean, my parents really should never have married. Millie, my mum, was—is—a free spirit with hippy-dippy views on parenting. She was a big fan of treating children like adults and letting them make their own decisions. Want Kit Kats for dinner? Go ahead. Want to wander barefoot and camp out in the garden for a week? Knock yourself out. Which is great when you’re a little kid, but not so much when you’re older and want stability. Or clean clothes. Or report cards signed.”

No, Millie wasn’t a great believer in structures like compulsory education or organized religion. Everything was controlled by the patriarchy. And damn, she knew how to work a judge during a custody hearing—probably where I get my own gift of persuasion in a courtroom.

My sister and I should have lived with my stable, boring dad, but instead sole custody was awarded to my mother because she turned on the waterworks. We saw him once a month for a year, but then he got transferred to Edinburgh for a job. May as well have been on another planet.

“Sounds like you practically raised yourself.” Trinity’s words pull me out of the bitterness swamp that threatens to engulf me whenever I think of my dad and the real, life-altering consequences of custody being awarded to the wrong parent.

“In a manner of speaking.”

I recall our meeting in my office, when I found out who she was and who she couldn’t be to me. “You said your own mum was on the neglectful end of the spectrum.”

“Yes, but it made me self-sufficient.” There’s more challenge in there. I don’t need anyone, especially a man, she’s telling me.

I emerged from my childhood similarly independent, yet still shackled to the reckless decisions my mother had made. I also recognize that it takes a village. To raise kids. To make a life. To become a full-fledged person. Trinity might think she needs no one, but I have what it takes to change her definition of need. Self-sufficiency is unnecessary when Lucas Wright is at your beck and call.

“What are you smirking at?” she asks.

“Just thinking of all the things I plan to do to you once the obstacles are out of the way. All the dirty things.”

She shakes her head. “You think you can emerge from this without any blood on your hands?”

She means the divorce and what will happen to her sister. She’ll use my job to justify the thickness of her walls as long as it suits her.

“I think you need to stop worrying about your sister and start thinking about yourself.”

“And conveniently once I start thinking of myself, it has knock-on benefits for you.”

“And my dick.”

She gasps and flicks a glance toward the boys, who are too busy to pay heed to us horny adults. “Not in this lifetime.”

But I can hear it in her voice. Trinity Jones is coming around.

---

My mum’s a thief. Yeah, I said it.

She justifies it with her bullshit theories on capitalism and socialism, and how the world belongs to the downtrodden. The meek shall inherit the earth and all that.

When my twin sister, Lizzie, and I were kids, Mum made us steal for her. Well, made is too strong. Encouraged, more like. She’d send us into the local shops with instructions to grab what we could using the five-fingered discount. Anything we could lay our grubby little hands on: food, booze, sweets, clothes. You name it, we lifted it.

By the age of eleven, Lizzie looked fifteen and was beautiful with it. My youthful bones were exactly that—youthful. I was scrawny and underfed and had the look of a tinker. Matted hair, dirty fingernails, muck baked into my skin by the sun we frequently slept under. When Mum took us on the road, we spent most of our time crashing in German forests and on Spanish beaches, living off welfare and baked beans cooked over campfires.

It’s our adventure, she’d say. And at first, we loved it. But Mum realized she’d lose alimony payments and social security benefits and risk the wrath of the authorities—the man, she’d call them like a seventies jive talker—if she kept us out of school, so by the time September rolled around, we’d be back in merry old England.

I loved school, which might sound weird. But after the unstructured existence my mum foisted on us for months, I loved the stability, and I especially loved to read. I wasn’t genius level, but I did have a whiff of prodigy about me—I was definitely too smart for my year, so I leaped ahead. And even though I was small for my age and then worse, really small compared to the older kids in my class, I was able to get by on personality.

Funny and hyperactive, I managed to make friends with all the high school cliques: the sporty ones, the nerds, the popular kids, the outcasts. Existing at some level above it all, I was lucky to have my supposedly hot sister (I didn’t see it myself, but my friends were really into her) smoothing my entry into the right circles.

You might be wondering what any of this has to do with my mum’s thieving ways. Hold up, I’m circling back to it. You see, Millie didn’t limit our extracurricular activities to our travels abroad. No, she had no scruples about doing it in her own backyard. We lived in Hammersmith, a working class neighborhood outside London, and “shopped” on King Street, the main thoroughfare (cool fact: not named for the king of England, but for Bishop John King, who gave land to the poor in the seventeenth century).

Boots, the pharmacy chain, was one of our favorite haunts to lift from. Lizzie liked it because of the beauty products, while I was a fan of picking up condoms, which I could sell to kids, and deodorant, especially as some fucker at school had said I smelled. So what if he was right. I decided to do something about it.

And one day I was caught, my first time getting pinched. Of course, Lizzie, aka the Artful Dodger, scarpered, leaving me, aka Oliver Twist, high and dry. I was arrested and brought to the police station—only eleven years old. But I was lucky. My guardian angel appeared in the form of Quentin Scarborough.

Mr. Scarborough was my teacher and he’d been watching me in school (not in a creepy way!). We called him Queer Quentin, not because he was gay but because his name was posh.

Yeah, the razor-sharp wit of the young.

The fuzz couldn’t get ahold of my mum, so they called the school to find my dad’s number. Mr. Scarborough showed up at the police station instead. Mum was nowhere to be found (surprise, surprise), but Mr. S was on hand to fix things.

I really liked him, but I was too cool to show it.

“What are we going to do with you, son?”

“I ain’t your son, guv.” (I was a tough little shit.)

He chuckled.

I sneered.

A week later, I took an exam. Weird punishment for shoplifting, but Mr. S had a plan. His favorite quote was from Robert Browning: I judge people by what they might be, not are, nor will be.

I passed that exam, scored a scholarship to King’s College, a fancy boarding school with notable alums like Orlando Bloom of Lord of the Rings fame as well as a handful of Eastern European aristos, and the rest is history. Up to Oxford to read law at sixteen, graduated at twenty, postgrad in the States at twenty-one before most American kids have even entered law school. How’s that for getting ahead? And all because of my sticky fingers.

Mum never forgave me.

Of course she didn’t come right out and say that, but I honestly think she would have preferred if I’d been locked up. I’d become part of the establishment she hated, a toff, a bloody wanker. She still takes the money I send her, though. She sees it as a redistribution of the wealth.

I see it as a payoff so I don’t have to spend a single moment with her. A payoff for my guilt, too, because that path Mr. S put me on veered away from Lizzie. Two roads diverged…I got sent to fucking Hogwarts and a new, shiny life, while she was left in the clutches of the Dursleys.

Even when I go back to London to visit Lizzie, I make sure I avoid my dear old mum. Worst son ever, but then I learned from the best.