Chapter Twenty-three #2
Tess had tried so hard not to think in terms of love, even with the undeniable connection with Bree.
She’d fought labeling what she felt, and she didn’t know how vulnerable she was willing to let herself be.
She’d survived some pretty harsh lessons, but the consequences of concluding that she was falling in love with Bree, of risking Bree not loving her—it terrified her.
Tess wiped her eyes. “Hearts on trial.”
Helene was sitting at her desk when Tess approached her the following week on Friday afternoon.
Tess had been engaged with an aggravated assault case all week and had spent little time on her administrative responsibilities.
She’d continued to avoid any direct contact with Bree.
She’d simply let Flo’s advice marinate during this week, and she’d been fine with that.
She’d mulled their discussion over but had reached no conclusions about how much of herself she was willing to gamble.
And maybe that was her reason for making no admissions to herself.
She knew that the more you loved someone, the more you wanted their love, the greater the risk.
With this effort to keep her focus on her professional duties, Tess waited until Helene looked up at her over the rim of her glasses.
Tess was working hard to develop a good working relationship with Helene. “Thanks so much for the court’s budget information. As I’m familiarizing myself with all this new information, I hope you can guide me if I have questions.”
“You’re welcome. If you keep me informed about what you’re wanting to look at, I’ll see what I can do to assist you.” Helene offered her a smile.
“Any luck with that case-assignment data I asked you for?” Tess had made the request official at their weekly Thursday meeting last week, and she’d had it on the agenda again at their meeting yesterday. “I was hoping to start looking at it this weekend.”
“I’ve had time to go through and collect the final calendars for the past two years.” Helene reached into a drawer and handed Tess a thumb drive. “Here you go.”
Tess suspected she had her own copies of several of these final calendars still in her account, from when they’d been sent out to all the judges.
She really wanted what Helene hadn’t given her yet—the initial random case assignments.
Tess’s planned focus was to compare the final calendars to those original random assignments and to take note of any changes.
She anticipated there would be occasional changes required while she was the presiding judge too, and understanding the past rationale for changes would help guide her going forward.
“What about the original random assignment documents those case calendars were built from? Like we discussed. You might not be able to give me two years’ worth, but you must be able to access them for the past several months.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve been busy. I’ll see what’s at my fingertips and dig deeper for more.”
Tess knew that Helene considered the calendar to be in her purview. “I know you’re the calendar expert, Helene. I’m not trying to interfere with your job, but just trying to do mine.”
“Judge Huffington never…” Helene closed her eyes for a moment, sighed, and then nodded. “Sorry.”
Tess was sure that Helene’s job wasn’t easy considering the wide shifts in personality she’d had to endure with the changes in who happened to be chosen as the presiding judge.
Tess tried to offer Helene a smile. “I’m not Simon Huffington.” Thank God.
Helene nodded again. “I’ll see what I can find for you. I can let you know what I’ve got early next week. It’s getting late, and I already have some important things to tie up before I can leave.”
Tess decided that was the best she was going to get today. “Okay. I’ll check back with you then. Have a good weekend.”
She headed to her chambers to finish some work before she headed home. As she passed Bree’s door, she saw that the light was out. She wondered how she was doing, if Bree missed her the way she missed Bree, what Bree had planned for this weekend. Then she headed into her office and closed the door.
Bree was at the forefront of Tess’s thoughts.
She didn’t think there was any diversion that would easily prevent that—but her heart wasn’t ready to sort out all she was feeling about Bree.
Any decision she made would be profound, and it would have to wait until she was no longer a danger to Bree’s safety.
In the meantime, maybe she could get Bree off her mind if she buried herself in paperwork.
She first wanted to look at those calendars from around the time of her shooting.
Tess easily found her own copy of the calendar file that she’d received just before the shooting and printed it.
In her four-month absence afterward, it didn’t look like she’d received the calendar assignments, so she printed those from the thumb drive.
It appeared that the cases that had been planned for her courtroom had been reassigned to Alan Larkin and Simon Huffington.
A big drug dealing case that she’d been preparing to hear just before the shooting had been reassigned to Alan, which made sense since he oversaw many criminal cases.
On closer examination, Tess saw that Eric Smith had been assigned to take the case that Alan’s reassignment to her drug case had left open, rather than Eric just receiving the drug case himself, although he was qualified to handle it too. Tess wrote herself a note to inquire.
There had undoubtedly been some last-minute shuffling in the chaos that her absence had created.
Tess continued to scroll through the calendars on the thumb drive, but without the original randomly assigned case calendars to compare, it was impossible to identify changes.
She yawned and stretched before she browsed through a few journal articles she’d flagged to read.
At seven o’clock, Tess decided it was time to throw in the towel.
She wasn’t accomplishing much more here.
She loaded some of the paperwork into her satchel with the aspiration that she might have better luck reading and absorbing what was in the journals and on the thumb drive calendars over the next two days at home.
She wanted to stay busy. She still hadn’t sorted out all her feelings, but she knew Bree was capable of causing her pain.
Deep pain. Tess reminded herself that there had been a reason she hadn’t put her heart at risk in the past.
When Tess arrived downstairs, she looked around for Bernard.
He was always willing to escort her to her car if she was alone, and she’d seen him earlier today.
She didn’t see him now and was about ready to head out on her own when Marnie appeared with her custodian cart and hurriedly approached her.
“Hey, Judge Fairchild. Are you looking for Bernard?”
“I was, but it looks like he’s not here.”
“He got a phone call saying his wife had been in a fender bender and was getting checked out at the emergency room—her neck hurt. He went to join her.”
“That’s a shame. I hope she’s okay.”
Marnie nodded. “You want me to walk you out? I’d be happy to.”
Tess shook her head. “Thanks, Marnie. I should be fine. You’d just have to walk back in by yourself, and I don’t want that. I’ll see you next week.” Tess headed out into the dark night alone.