Chase
Monday morning’s meetings went well. Better than well, actually. The Hendersons signed off on the settlement I’d drafted, both Bob and Catherine complimented my work in front of their clients, and Mrs. Henderson had smiled at me after they left.
That almost never happened.
By Tuesday, I was well and truly back in the grind. I sat through three client meetings while Catherine or Bob handled the actual talking. I took notes, learning by observation.
One deposition prep session lasted four hours.
Another discovery review lasted so long my eyes crossed.
And then there were the emails.
One after another after another.
Wednesday started the same way, with a morning meeting with the Kowalskis, whose mediation wasscheduled for next week. Afterward, there were documents to review. The afternoon was spent drafting a motion that Bob would rewrite anyway.
He insisted I practice regardless of what he might do with my finished product.
By 4 p.m., I was staring at my computer screen, the words blurring together, when Ashley appeared in my doorway.
Pop.
“You’ve got a walk-in,” she said, cracking her gum. “Mrs. Chenza says it’s urgent.”
Mrs. Chenza was a newer client, a divorce case in which her husband had left her for a woman twenty years younger. It was the standard story except for one part—the part where he claimed she’d hidden assets during the marriage.
She hadn’t. I’d checked. Extensively.
“Conference Room B?” I asked.
“Yep. I already got her water.”
I grabbed the Chenza file and headed to the conference room, expecting another routine check-in about timeline or paperwork or one of the seventeen other things divorcing people worried about when they couldn’t control anything else in their lives.
Mrs. Chenza was in her sixties, small and neat in a way that reminded me of my grandmother, and she was crying. But it wasn’t the angry crying I witnessedin family law.
It was a quiet, defeated weeping that broke my heart as I entered the room.
“Mrs. Chenza.” I sat down across from her, setting the file aside. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
“He took my mother’s bracelet,” she said, her voice shaking. “When he came to pick up more of his things, he took it from my jewelry box. It was my mother’s. She . . . she gave it to me before she died twenty years ago. It’s not worth much money, but it’s—it’s all I have left of her.”
I pulled up the asset inventory we’d compiled during discovery. “Did you list it in the initial filing?”
“No. It’s costume jewelry, maybe worth a hundred dollars. I didn’t think . . . I didn’t think he’d take it.” She wiped her eyes. “He knows what it means to me. He’s doing this to hurt me.”
Technically, if it wasn’t listed in the initial inventory, it was going to be hard to claim. Her husband could argue it was marital property. Technically, this was the kind of thing that would drag out the settlement and cost her a hundred times more in legal fees than the bracelet was worth.
But technically wasn’t the point.
I pulled out my phone. “What’s his lawyer’s number?”
“I don’t—why?”
“Because I’m going to call them right now and tell them that if your husband doesn’t return your mother’s bracelet by end of business today, I’m going to make this divorce so expensive and time-consuming that he’ll wish he’d never left you.”
Mrs. Chenza blinked. “You can do that?”
