Family Law Gin Phillips (great books to read .TXT) 📖

there had been neither hide nor hair of the shooter. For all she knew, the psychopath had put a bullet in his own head as soon as he left their house. Regardless, if he had planned to follow up, surely he would have done so by now. And yet she had agreed that if a reasonable offer came in, she and Evan would relocate to some unknown destination, their names and number unlisted. If it happened once, it could happen again, Evan had said. You’re making it way too easy for someone to find you. She had agreed to it—to all that needless effort and thought and expense—and yet she could still feel her husband holding himself back. Or maybe she was the one holding herself back. Sometimes it was impossible to tell.

“I feel the same way sometimes,” she said.

“Like I’m looking for a reason to be mad?” he said. “I don’t have to look. I have a reason. I want to keep you alive. And you seem less interested in that than I do. You’re just—pretending.”

She grabbed for a paper towel. Since they met, he had been the other half of her just like the movies promised. With other men, there’d been a part of her tucked away, watching, but Evan had reached every part of her and they had melted into a new thing.

Lately she had felt herself reforming again, separate.

“What do you want?” she asked. “What else do you want, I mean?”

“You know,” he said.

“You asked me to think about it,” she said. “I’m thinking about it.”

“You’re not really thinking about it.”

“I don’t want to join another practice,” she said. “I don’t want to go back to a bigger firm. I made my practice from scratch. It’s mine. It took years, and you know all that.”

“I don’t know why it’s such a huge difference if you join another firm. You’d be more secure in one of the buildings downtown with a front desk and a security guard. You’d still keep your own cases. You’ve had enough offers. You could go in as a partner.”

“Like Garrison Langley offered to—”

“Don’t do that.” He dropped an elbow to the counter, and the toaster rattled behind him. “You’re good at what you do. You know damn well that Garrison is the only one who ever offered you a job because he wanted sex.”

She stared at him. The innards of the toaster were fading like a tuning fork.

“Okay,” Evan said. “Not all of them offered a partnership because they wanted sex.”

The laugh came out of her on an exhale. And just that quickly, the distance between them almost vanished. There was always this moment in their fights—tightness and tension and then something like an orgasm without the lust. A release. It was almost worth the fight itself.

Evan reached for her, his hand heavy on her hip bone.

“I am good at what I do,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “We’re saying the same thing.”

She nodded, even though she knew it wasn’t true.

III.

Lucia sat in the lobby, a green folder with the Conway deposition tucked under her arm, a vodka tonic in her hand, deciding whether to eat in the hotel restaurant or order room service. She was in no hurry to decide. The hotel had constructed a fake wilderness between the check-in desk and the restaurant, and she had chosen a seat in the shade of a rubber tree. Flower beds sprang from the carpet. A few inches from her feet, the turquoise water of an indoor stream wound all the way to the elevator bank, and ducks splashed nearby. Barry Manilow was playing on the hotel speakers. Every bit of it was false, and yet it was a scene well set.

A man stood underneath a different rubber tree. Dark haired and towering, gray pants and a white shirt unbuttoned at the throat, holding a glass of red wine. He caught her eye—she thought he caught her eye. Before Evan, she’d never dated a blonde or a man under six feet. With Evan she got the dark hair but not the height, not that it ever mattered.

She got this feeling in hotels occasionally. A remnant. She still—especially after a drink—could look across the potted ferns, see a man approaching, and remember when that sight set the gears into motion. It was distinctly different, the imagined relationship from the actual. That man walking toward you wasn’t real, not in those first few seconds of forward motion. He was anything and everything, fill in the blanks, and then you married and you filled in the blanks. You never knew anyone as well as you knew the man you married, and that specificity was beautiful and deadening all at once.

The man with the red wine smiled at her. She appreciated the breadth of his chest.

She looked away, noticing the shamrocks sparkling along the front desk, each decoration as big as a basketball. She thought of how Rachel’s St. Patrick’s Day earrings hung nearly to her shoulders, green clovers glittering. It was a wonder that the girl’s earlobes weren’t stretched down to her chin. Last Halloween, Lucia had bought her a pair of light-up pumpkins that promised one hundred hours of battery life. Hopefully, they would still work this year.

A goldfish flashed through the stream at her feet.

She took a swallow of her drink, and she appreciated that it was more vodka than tonic. The man with the red wine had not moved.

She did not want or need a different man. Yet still she pictured him walking toward her. He would say, “Do you think the ducks are real?” or he would say “I wouldn’t interrupt you if you were reading a book, but that looks like work.” She would know that it was a line, but it would be a reasonably smart line, and he would bring up, oh, he would keep with the jungle theme and ask if she’d read any Jane Goodall, and they’d talk about In the Shadow