“Stop. I have a reputation.” He sighed, but it sounded happy. “Okay, enough about my inability to be cynical. You coming to the thing on Wednesday?”
“What thing?”
“The lecture? Professor Rashford from Harvard? Civil rights litigation? Any of this ringing a bell?”
“Oh. Right. That”
“You forgot.”
“I didn’t forget. I just… have a lot happening right now.”
“Gianna, he literally argued Brown v. Board of Education II. He’s a legend. You have to come.”
“I’ll try.”
“That’s literally code for no.”
“It’s code for I’ll try.” I smiled even though he couldn’t see it. “I promise. If I can swing it, I’ll be there.”
We talked for another twenty minutes about nothing important—his upcoming interview with a firm in Midtown, my professor who kept assigning readings like we had no other classes, whether the bodega cat near campus was actually immortal or just really good at playing dead.
By the time we hung up, it was past ten and I still had two case files to review before tomorrow.
I made it through one before the words started swimming.
Monday morning arrived too fast and far too bright.
I dragged myself to campus, fueled by coffee and stubbornness, and headed straight for Professor Diane’s office. She’d sent an email last night asking me to come by first thing, which usually meant she had a new case to dump on my already overflowing plate.
Diane looked exhausted when I walked in—the kind of tired that came from fighting systems, not people. Her gray hair was pulled back in its usual neat bun, but there were shadows under her eyes that suggested she’d been up late working.
“Gianna.” She gestured to the chair across from her desk. “Sit.”
I sat, already bracing myself.
Diane had spent her entire career fighting housing inequity. She was sharp as hell, took exactly zero nonsense from opposing counsel, and had a reputation for being both brilliant and terrifying. She was also funny in this dry, cutting way that made you laugh even when you knew you probably shouldn’t.
“I’m assigning you a new case,” she said, sliding a thick folder across her desk.
I looked at it warily. “How bad?”
“Thirty-seven families facing coordinated displacement dressed up as ‘revitalization.’”
My stomach dropped. “That’s not the case. That’s a slow-motion massacre.”
“That’s real estate development in New York.” Her mouth curved without humor. “The building is in a working-class neighborhood. Longtime residents. Many of them are immigrants. The usual pattern—buy the building, claim it needs renovations, jack up the rent, force everyone out.”
I opened the folder and started reading. The building is in Brooklyn. The residents had been there for years, some of them decades. They’d formed a tenant association, tried to negotiate, gotten lawyers involved.
None of it had worked.
“This is textbook displacement,” I murmured, flipping through the documentation.
“It is.” Diane leaned back in her chair, watching me. “Which is why I want you on it. You know these tactics. You’ve seen them before.”
I had. More intimately than anyone in this office realized.
“Who’s the defendant?” I asked, already knowing it wouldn’t be an individual landlord. Corporate entities always hid behind LLCs and shell companies.
