Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes it’s just an excuse.
I take the wine to the sink, hesitate, then pour it down the drain. I rinse my hands, water cold enough to numb. I want to wash the day off with it. I can’t.
I have a headache at the base of my skull; it blooms there like a flower that nobody ordered.
I dry my hands and sit again. I try not to think about the daughter missing from the courtroom today. I try not to think about the three offspring who were there and the way loyalty flows through their veins. I try not to think about the way he said “Counselor” while giving nothing away.
I try not to think about my pulse betraying me.
Instead, I focus on my contempt and let it do its work. Contempt is clear-cut… and safe.
Men like him pretend the law is a game they have to win. They have all sorts of fucked up ideas.
They call it family when it’s enterprise; they call it business when it’s violence and coercion; they call it honor when it’s extortion.
They teach their sons to pick up guns and their daughters to watch and accept.
And then a man like Luca walks into a courtroom and makes people sit a little straighter.
But it’s all myth.
That’s why I hate him, I tell myself. Not because he’s good-looking in a way that annoys me, not because my body had the indecency to remember it is, in fact, alive and that it’s been way too long, but because he is good at making other people believe that he’s nothing more than an ordinary man.
But he’s not. He’s a man who built a criminal empire.
Calm is not the same as harmless. efficient at making other people believe they are safer near him than far. And the truth is the opposite.
I open the notes app I keep for arguments. I type: Calm is not the same as harmless. Judges are human, not gods. Remind them they are human, a jury of one.
I rub my eyes with the heels of my hands. I try to remember the last night I came home this keyed up and whether I slept. I probably didn’t.
Tonight I stack my casebooks into a tower on the dining table that I never use for food. I think about running along the boardwalk in the morning, the ocean spitting salt into my mouth while I pretend that I’m not still replaying every moment in that courtroom.
There’s a knock on a neighbor’s door, footsteps in the hall. Someone laughs, the sound drifting under my door, then disappearing down the hall.
It’s a habit, not fear. Just caution. Fear is a thing that immobilizes you, sits on your chest and stops you from moving. Caution is safety.
Luca Conti walked free tonight.
He will not stay free. Not if I can help it.
Chapter Three
Luca
I wake before the alarm, before the house wakes up, before the light comes down through the window and blinds me.
For a second, the ceiling is just a rectangle of soft gray, and my body does what it has practiced for eleven years—check the corners, catalog the sounds, brace for the scrape of a bolt.
Then the memory catches up with the present, and the tension releases from my bones by degree. No clank. No barked commands. No stale air. Just the hush of a house in the early morning. My house.
I am in my bed.
The mattress gives under my weight in a way I didn’t even know I was missing after years of sleeping on a thin cot. The sheets are smooth and expensive, not the stiff institutional blends that rasp against my skin.
There’s a faint scent of lavender wafting through the air, and something else. Clean. That’s it. Just clean.
A breeze moves the drapes as if the house itself is breathing in the beautiful morning air.
