She continued dragging Kelsi further through the office, which was made up of several cubicles behind Cat’s desk in an open area and six doors set in the walls on the periphery.
She spotted a few people bent over their desks, typing out emails or scanning through files. They all smiled and waved, but nobody called out an introduction as Cat kept a tight grip on her arm and a quick pace through the area. A few of the doors they passed had nameplates, but two were empty. Cat led her to one of the unnamed doors, throwing it open with a flourish of her arm that was more ceremonious than the situation required.
“Welcome to your new home!”
Kelsi looked around, sparing the office a quick glance. It looked pretty standard. A large mahogany desk sat in the center of the room with a rolling chair behind it, and there were a couple filing cabinets on one wall with criminal law treatises, casebooks, and the current Code of Virginia stacked on top.
What she immediately loved, however, was the big window on the far wall. She finally managed to disentangle her arm from Cat’s death grip and walked over to the window. Sure, the view looked over the parking lot, but it was infinitely better than herprevious office, which had basically been a converted closet and had no windows at all.
“What do you think?” Cat smiled at her expectantly, bouncing on her toes with her excitement.
“It’s perfect.”
“Great!” Cat positively beamed at Kelsi before glancing down at her watch. “All right, well, I need to take you in to meet with Banksy. She wants to talk to you. But once you’re done with her, I’ll get you set up with an employee badge and logged in to our systems.” She gestured to Kelsi to follow her and they walked back out into the main office to the door at the very back. “Most of our stuff is still paper. We’re a little behind the times, but since I started, we’ve been trying to get more technology incorporated and finally bring this place into the twenty-first century.”
“Sounds great.” Kelsi preferred physical files over electronic files, anyway. She liked being able to spread everything out around her so she could literally see the bigger picture of the case.
Cat knocked on the door as Kelsi stared at theChristine Banksnameplate affixed to it. A muffled “come in” sounded from inside, and Cat pushed the door open to reveal the office within, which, Kelsi noted immediately, was much larger than Kelsi’s new space.
The familiar woman behind the desk had short gray hair cut into a severe bob. Once she’d grown a streak of gray, she’d given up dyeing it brown. Her dark-brown eyes, hidden behind a pair of horn-rimmed black glasses, looked as intelligent as always and were trained on Kelsi. She smiled while standing up to greet her. The slate-gray skirt and blazer she wore were sleekand polished, and black pumps shone on her feet as she walked around the desk toward the younger women.
She gave Kelsi a hug, embracing her tightly and telling her, “I’m so glad we finally have you in this office, let alone back in town. Your mom and I have been so excited the past few weeks knowing you were coming back.”
Kelsi smiled at the woman as she stepped back from her and returned to sit behind her desk. She’d known Banksy (everyone learned very quickly not to call her Christine) since she was six years old, when Banksy first moved to town. She was about a decade younger than Kelsi’s mom, putting her at around forty-five years old, and had been taken under her and Dylan’s moms’ wings immediately. They had quickly become the best of friends, and they still met every Sunday night for homemade tapas and cocktails. Each week they made sure to try a new recipe, whether it be the food or the alcohol.
Kelsi had always looked up to the older woman and greatly admired the strong backbone she possessed.
Banksy waved at one of the chairs in front of the desk, saying, “Sit, please! We have so much to talk about.” She looked to Cat as Kelsi pulled out the chair on the left and sat down, crossing her right leg over her left and relaxing back into the chair. “Cat, thank you for your help getting Kelsi in and showing her around a little bit. I’ll turn her back over to you after we’re done here.”
Cat waved goodbye with a sly grin and shut the door behind her.
“Okay, Kelsi, tell me. How have you been holding up?”
Banksy gave her a sympathetic grin that almost made Kelsi choke up, caught off guard by the question.
“I’ve been better, but getting there,” was all she could manage to say. She’d rather not cry on her first day, and she internally begged Banksy to take the hint and move on.
Banksy nodded sympathetically and leaned across the desk to pat Kelsi’s hand. “You’ll be okay, sweetheart. This is a minor setback. Better things are on their way.”
Kelsi forced a wobbly smile and changed the subject. “So, what did you want to talk about?”
“Right, yes. Your work!” Banksy glanced at her watch and then the door, a small but genuine grin playing at her lips now. “I’m actually waiting on someone else to join us before getting into the nitty-gritty of it, but I have a big case I want to assign to you and another new hire to handle. But enough of that for now. I’m not going to say anything else until he arrives. That case is going to eat up a lot of your time, so I’m going to try not to assign you too many additional cases that will require a lot of prep work. Are you okay with tackling a larger share of the misdemeanor-appeals and probation-violation dockets?”
Kelsi was torn. She was intrigued by this significant case Banksy was teasing and it seemed like it was a big deal for her to have it, but she couldn’t get rid of the sour taste in the back of her mouth at hearing she would be on the misdemeanor-appeals and probation-violation beats. She had started with those dockets as a first-year attorney and worked her way up to bigger cases. Going back to handling them had her feeling like she was being demoted. But, even with her experience, she was still the new hire.
After a long pause, she finally choked out, “Yeah, that’s fine.”
Banksy saw straight through her, though, and said wryly, “It’s not a punishment, Kelsi, nor is it training wheels. Normally all of the attorneys here rotate taking them, no matter howsenior they are, unless we have a hire fresh out of law school who needs the experience. Now, I’m giving you those dockets because they won’t take up too much of your time, and you’ll be able to focus on the case I’m assigning to you. I would rather your attention not be split nor your work suffer because you’re stressed trying to juggle too many things.”
Kelsi, properly chastised, nodded at Banksy. “Of course. I understand.” She caught Banksy’s glance at her watch again and asked, “When are you expecting this other prosecutor to arrive?” Kelsi, not known for her patience, wondered if she could somehow convince Banksy to spill the beans on this big case early, if whomever she was waiting for was much later than expected.
“He should be here any second now.” Banksy looked like she was fighting a smile and could barely tear her eyes from the door to look at Kelsi when she answered.
“If you want to tell me anything about the case now, I don’t mind hearing the information twice.”
“No, we’ll wait—” Banksy was cut off by two sharp raps on the door. “Come in!”
The door opened, and Kelsi first saw a sleek man’s black dress shoe. She trailed her eyes up and over the man’s muscular thigh cloaked in black suit pants and what appeared to be a very broad chest. Then, finally, she met the most vibrant blue eyes—hisblue eyes.
