And I did.
Later that night, when the house was still again, I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop open and found myself staring at the message thread with Logan.
The messages had started light, but somewhere between the jokes and the updates, they’d become a lifeline.
He’d ask how Harper was doing, and then almost without noticing, howIwas.
What kind of day I’d had, if I was getting any sleep, little things that shouldn’t mean so much, but did.
And somewhere between those lines, I realized I wasn’t just helping him keep his world together. I’d unintentionally become a part of it.
That thought should’ve scared me.
But instead, it made me smile.
I closed the laptop, turned off the light, and stood by the window for a moment, looking out at the tranquil street below.
Somewhere, miles away, Logan was probably doing the same. Staring at a different skyline, thinking about home.
I pressed a hand over my heart and whispered to the dark,
“You’re just babysitting, Dani.”
But even as I said it, I knew it was already too late.
Chapter 19
Dani
Up until the last few days, I hadn’t had any serious cases dragging away my attention from Harper. But today, that all changed.
The minute the verdict was read, it saturated the air.
“Guilty.”
The word didn’t echo as people expected. It didn’t crash into the room or leave silence. It just sat there like a weight resting on my shoulder causing a numbness to slowly creep in, dulling everything around me as I struggled to process what had happened.
Like the world had shifted slightly out of alignment, and I was the only one who noticed.
I stayed still as the courtroom moved around me. Papers shuffled, chairs scraped. Voices rose and fell as if nothing irreversible had happened, like someone’s future hadn’t just been decided in a single breath.
My client didn’t react right away either.
She just sat there. Then her head dropped, a barely perceptible fraction, but I caught it. In that fleeting motion, I sensed something inside her collapse, as though her resolve fractured.
She was close to my age, maybe a year older. She came from Guatemala with only the hope people cling to when they have nothing else. When we first met, she apologized for her accent, then joked as if she were trying to make me more comfortable. Her laugh was soft, almost shy, but her eyes burned with determination when she spoke of improving life for her son back home. Her case wasn’t violent or newsworthy, just a single failure to appear on a speeding ticket, her first offense. But it brought harsh consequences because she was undocumented and unable to pay penalties. No safety net. No family behind her. No one to soften the blow.
Just me, and I hadn’t been enough.
I leaned in anyway and said what I was supposed to: next steps, appeals, timelines. My voice sounded detached, words mechanical, even as my throat began to burn.
“I’m sorry,” she said under her breath.
That almost broke the well-structured, confident, facade I wore each time I set out to advocate for my clients. Not the verdict, not the judge, not even the outcome I’d been bracing myself for since the middle of the trial.
It was that moment. That quiet, devastating surrender.
Because she shouldn’t be apologizing to me.
