Chapter Two How It Started
M irabelle and Bastian grew up in an impoverished section of New Orleans’ French Quarter. Bastian’s family moved in next door to Mirabelle and her mother the summer before third grade, and they became instant friends. Mirabelle didn’t know who her father was; her mother was a prostitute and a stripper who loved her daughter dearly but was often away for long periods, leaving Mirabelle alone in the house for days at a time. Bastian would frequently hide out there while his parents screamed at one another. His biological father died when he was five, and his mother turned to alcohol. She married the first man who asked, and his stepfather was very verbally abusive until Bastian turned twelve, when it evolved into physical abuse. The first time his stepfather beat him was because he caught Bastian smuggling food out of the house for a nearly starving Mirabelle, whose mother hadn’t brought food back in close to a week. Mirabelle had patched him up as best she could, and they slept cuddled up together in her bed for the first time, vowing to always be there for each other.
It was during those nights, sharing Mirabelle’s twin bed, that they made their plans for the future. They were smart; they knew their best chance of getting out of their situation was to work hard and do well in school. One of their teachers, an older, stringent woman named Clara Bell, who never married or had children and was known for being a demanding teacher to please, developed a soft spot for them. She convinced her brother, Ned, to hire them at his convenience store when they were thirteen and to pay them under the table. They worked hard, putting out stock, keeping the store clean, helping customers, and when the store wasn’t busy, they would study in the stockroom. Clara and Ned set up bank accounts for them under their names after Bastian’s stepfather found some of the money he had hidden in the room and stole it.
It came out in the eighth grade that Mirabelle’s mother was a stripper who prostituted on the side when another parent who used her services saw her at an award ceremony and told his son. Mirabelle’s life became hell after. She never had many friends, but after that, she only had Bastian and two or three of his friends who didn’t abandon him for sticking with her. The girls bullied her, and the boys seemed to think her mother's occupation gave them free rein over her body. Bastian protected her and beat more than one boy up for groping her in the hallway or on the bus. He was arrested at fifteen when he walked in on a mutual friend attempting to rape her. They were at the boy’s house, and he took Mirabelle to show her where the bathroom was. When he didn’t return after, Bastian went looking for them and found them in his bedroom; Mirabelle pinned under him, sobbing while he held one hand over her mouth and tried to get her pants off with the other. Bastian broke the boy’s nose and knocked out several teeth before Mirabelle was able to pull him away and whisper that she wanted to go home.
The boy’s parents came home and called the cops upon finding their son semi-conscious in his bedroom, bloodied and bruised. Bastian’s stepfather came through for him at that time. When Mirabelle told him what had happened, he called a lawyer, found Mirabelle’s mother at the strip club, and then brought them both to the police station so Mirabelle could give a statement. Within four hours of Bastian’s arrest, he was released without charges, and the other boy was arrested for attempted rape. He ended up getting off with a slap on the wrist, but word got out at school, and the family had to move away.
While they both had crushes on each other on and off over the years and messed around throughout junior and senior high school, even losing their virginity to one another at sixteen – the only time they had sex - they mutually agreed that their focus was on school and work, getting straight A’s and saving money to move to New York City and attend Columbia Law School. When they were seventeen, Clara died after a battle with cancer, and to their shock and delight, Ned informed them that while she didn’t have a lot of money left after the medical bills, she did leave them her car and enough money to get them to New York. When they graduated high school and announced they had gotten into Columbia, Ned signed their bank account over to them, and they found out that he had been adding a little extra when he was able to. Unlike Clara, he had a wife and kids, so it wasn’t a lot, but it was the equivalent of about three months' rent in New York City. They packed up the car and left New Orleans the day they picked up their report cards.
Their relationship was never able to move past best friends, despite the love they had for one another, because Mirabelle was adamantly against having children. She babysat a few times as a teenager, and everything about children bothered her. She didn’t outright hate them and actually enjoyed the stage where they asked questions about everything, but when they cried or got too loud, her patience would vanish instantly. While a crying child had most people on their feet to check on them, it went through her like a fork scraping on a plate, and she was instantly annoyed. She also didn’t like having anything or anyone dependent on her for survival. She never owned plants, and while she loved animals, she didn’t want to look after them.
Bastian, on the other hand, desperately wanted a family. He wanted to prove he could do it better than his parents, and while Mirabelle thought that was a terrible reason to have children, she never said anything or tried to change his mind. His dream was a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, three kids and a dog, and hers was to travel and see all the things she had only read about growing up. She didn’t want to settle or be held back by outside influences.
It was in their first year of university that they realized their life goals didn’t align, and they were both broken by it. Mirabelle had always followed Bastian. He was the more outgoing and assertive of them, and while he never told her what to do, she was more dependent on him than he was on her. Because of this, he held on to the hope that she would change her mind about children for far longer than she hoped he would change his.
University was where Mirabelle found herself and her confidence. While Bastian did his undergraduate in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, she did hers in Earth and Environmental Sciences. For the first time, Mirabelle and Bastian were doing things without each other. Bastian joined the wrestling team and the debate society, while Mirabelle joined the Eco-Reps and Environmental Biology Society. They still did things together, like the Mock Trial Club and the Pre-Law Society, but they drifted apart despite sharing an apartment.
In their first year of Law School, Bastian met Ana Nickels and fell hard and fast for her. Mirabelle distanced herself even more, moving into an apartment with friends from her classes halfway through the year because she couldn’t handle Bastian bringing Ana back to their apartment at night. Ana moved in right away, and he proposed to her after passing the bar and getting his first job with a law firm.
It was after the engagement and when he was over the honeymoon period with Ana that he realized he barely saw Mirabelle anymore and began reaching out, wanting to spend time together. Mirabelle let him back into her life but kept him at arm's length for a while. Ana was not a fan of Mirabelle, and she didn’t want to step on her toes or create problems. Two years later, she sat with Bastian’s family at their wedding ceremony, silently crying throughout the whole thing. She ducked out of the reception early to go home and eat ice cream with her roommate.
But, in some weird twist of fate, both Bastian and Mirabelle got hired at the same law firm, Tulk and Associates, a year later, and it very quickly became apparent that they were a dream team. They rose quickly to become the stars of the firm. Mirabelle had the research and investigative skills that private investigators would kill for, and Bastian was a beast in the courtroom, arguing circles around the opposing council. It made for a lot of longer hours in the office together, and they slowly became closer again until their friendship had returned to normal, just a lot less physically affectionate.
Ana started pushing for a baby, and since it was something Bastian had always wanted, he happily agreed. But when she announced she stopped taking her birth control, he suddenly found himself unable to perform. After a few months of trying with the same results, he went to the doctor, who found nothing wrong and suggested it was a mental block, so he had a conversation with Ana, went to couples therapy and eventually agreed that now wasn’t the right time to have a child. She went back on birth control, and his erectile dysfunction went away. He was so paranoid that he insisted on using a condom and began pulling out as well. He confessed to Mirabelle that he understood her stance on having children better now because the thought of his life changing so much terrified him.
Two months later, Ana happily informed him she was pregnant, and after Bastian got over his shock, he was pissed and demanded to know how it happened, considering she was on birth control, and he was using condoms and pulling out. After insisting everything must have failed, which caused Bastian to heatedly point out that the chances of all three methods just happening to fail while she was ovulating were extremely low, she admitted that she hadn’t gone back on birth control at all and lied about it so he would get over the mental block, he blew up and left, punching a hole in the wall as he did. Bastian wasn’t proud of that; he’d never raised his fists in anger at a woman and had promised himself at a young age that he wouldn’t stoop that low, but he knew at that moment that he did not want children.
Bastian immediately went to Mirabelle’s and told her what happened. She comforted him and then hesitantly asked if he was positive it was his baby. After some reflection, he realized that he had no idea what Ana did while he worked long hours at the office. He went home to find Ana gone. After some more thought, he pulled out her laptop and began to search for evidence. It didn’t take him long to find a folder of pictures and videos of Ana and, to his shock, their couple’s therapist. He sent everything to Mirabelle and was surprised when she asked if she could represent him.
He agreed, and she told him not to do anything until she got back to him. “Just pretend you're angry about the pregnancy and work late for a few days.” She advised and then got to work. Throughout the divorce process, Bastian was shocked by the level of ruthlessness Mirabelle displayed. He had noticed that she was no longer the wallflower she was in high school, and he knew she had gained a lot of confidence in university and since she started at Tulk, but the way she went after Ana was almost pathological. She filed for an at-fault divorce, listing adultery as the reason, and in the divorce papers she filed, she demanded an in-utero paternity test for both Bastian and the man Ana cheated on him with because if she had the baby before the marriage was dissolved, Bastian would be, by default, the legal father, so she wanted it established as soon as possible whether or not he or the affair partner was the biological father.
She did her research on the affair partner and found out he was married, with three children and went to church every Sunday. Not wanting to give Ana a chance to warn him, while Mirabelle was serving Ana in her and Bastian’s apartment, she had the affair partner served in the parking lot of the church with a subpoena to provide a DNA sample to establish the paternity of Ana Avery’s unborn child in front of his wife, outing his affair. The intern who served him gave his wife Mirabelle’s card before leaving as a final fuck you. The baby turned out to be the affair partners, and Ana went away quietly afterward, signing off on everything quickly. The affair partner's wife filed for divorce and hired Mirabelle, who represented her just as ruthlessly as she represented Bastian, getting her the house and a substantial spousal maintenance payment on top of child support.
Bastian got a vasectomy after the paternity was established, telling Mirabelle he realized when Ana told him she was pregnant that it wasn’t what he wanted and that he’d felt so much panic and fear at the idea of having a baby that it would take many years in therapy to work out his feelings surrounding being a father, and while he was working on it, he had decided his need to do it better then his parents was a pretty terrible reason to bring something innocent into the world. He became very cynical about love with some serious trust issues following his divorce. He wasn’t ready to verbally admit it, but the fact that he had practically worshiped the ground Ana walked on but would have left her in a heartbeat if Mirabelle came to him and said she changed her mind about having kids with him messed him up as well. He decided to work on himself in therapy for a while before he got back into dating.
It was during this time at Tulk that Mirabelle met and started dating Eddie, a public policy lawyer. It was very casual at first since Casey worked at Tulk as an administrative assistant, and she felt that Eddie was using her to make Casey jealous. When Casey moved back to Michigan a few months into their dating to be with her long-distance boyfriend, Mirabelle felt most secure about dating him, and they began to take their relationship seriously.
After a year, Eddie proposed, and Mirabelle accepted, which began another downturn in Mirabelle’s and Bastian’s relationship, this time from Bastian’s side, which resulted in him distancing himself from her as the wedding approached. She may have been a hypocrite, considering she distanced herself from Bastian when he was with Ana, but she also felt she handled it better than he did. She was always polite and kind to Ana, and while she was distant from Bastian, she didn’t turn down hanging out when he asked or stop responding to texts and ignore his phone calls.
The drama ramped up, resulting in an argument the day before her wedding. He showed up and walked her down the aisle, told her he loved her and left right after. She later found out he accepted a temporary transfer to the Dallas branch of the law firm for six months and submitted his resignation from Tulk when he got back. She flew to Dallas to confront him. Determined to fix things and not lose her best friend over something she saw as a temper tantrum, she found out he was going to Henderson and applied to be his personal assistant. He didn’t stop her or get upset; he just seemed relieved not to be working in the same company as Eddie, whom he told her he couldn’t stand. Mirabelle promised to keep Eddie away from him, and after a few months, their friendship went back to normal and stayed that way. Bastian avoided Eddie as much as possible and Mirabelle made her peace with keeping the two parts of her life separate from each other.