Chapter 2
David
“The printer is on fire.”
I look up from the Ostrowski contract. “It’s not on fire.”
“It’s making a sound.” Eddie, our associate, stands in my doorway looking like he’s already questioning his career choices. “A burning sound.”
“Printers don’t make burning sounds.”
“This one does. It also smells like burning.”
I set down my pen. “Did you open it?”
“I didn’t want to void the warranty.”
“Eddie. Printers open as part of their function. You won’t void anything.”
He blinks. I watch him recalibrate—Harvard Law, Order of the Coif, federal clerkship, and now he’s standing in a brand-new office debating printer maintenance with one of his bosses.
If this isn’t what he imagined when he accepted a position at a startup firm, he’s hidden his disappointment well. So far.
“Just—unplug it,” I tell him. “And open the back panel. It’s probably a paper jam.”
“Right.” He nods like I’ve issued a complex directive. “Paper jam. Got it.”
He disappears. Thirty seconds later: “There’s definitely smoke.”
I push back from my desk.
The printer is not technically on fire. It is, however, producing a thin ribbon of gray smoke from its rear ventilation panel that doesn’t inspire confidence. I unplug it, open the back, and extract a crumpled sheet of paper that has fused itself to the drum with the tenacity of a hostile witness.
“How,” I ask, “did you get legal-sized paper into a letter-sized tray?”
Eddie peers over my shoulder. “I thought it would fit if I—”
“Don’t finish that sentence.”
From the conference room, Caleb’s voice carries down the hall.
He’s on the phone with a client—relaxed, confident, cracking a joke about SEC filings that actually lands.
My brother was born for this. The client-facing energy, the sell, the charm.
He wanted his own firm the way some people want a vacation home: with certainty and a bunch of architectural preferences.
I wanted it too. I did.
What I didn’t anticipate was that running your own practice means you are simultaneously the senior partner, the IT department, the office manager, and the person who fixes the printer when your twenty-six-year-old associate feeds it the wrong paper and sets it on fire.
At Luminous, there were people for this. An entire floor of them, whose job was to make sure the infrastructure worked so the lawyers could lawyer. I showed up, did my work, left at a reasonable hour, picked up Michaela, reheated the dinner my housekeeper prepared. Controlled. Predictable.
Now it’s nine-fifteen in the morning and I’m covered in toner.
“Order a new one,” I tell Eddie. “Not from Costco this time.”
“Should I expense it?”
“To what? We don’t have expense categories yet.”
“I could create a spreadsheet—”
“Just buy the printer, Eddie.”
I wash the toner off my hands in the kitchen sink. The gray water spirals down the drain like it has personally offended me.
This is not how I pictured the first month of Kingsley & Kingsley.
In my more disciplined fantasies, Caleb and I stride into our beautifully renovated office each morning and dispense strategic brilliance to grateful clients.
We build a selective, profitable practice with impeccable reputations and a minimalist website.
There are no printer-related emergencies.
No toner on my cuffs. No twenty-six-year-old associate asking whether office supplies require preauthorization like he’s filing a motion with Staples.
There’s also, in those fantasies, no custody petition hanging over my head like a guillotine.
Reality is less elegant.
I dry my hands on a paper towel and check my phone. Two texts from the nanny.
The first is apologetic enough to tighten my chest before I’ve finished reading.
Marta:
I’m so sorry, David. Mama had another bad night. I’m at the hospital with her. I can’t do school pickup today.
I can come tomorrow if she’s stable. I’ll know more this afternoon. Please tell Michaela I’m sorry.
I close my eyes and press my thumb against the bridge of my nose.
Marta has been with us for three years. Michaela adores her with the uncomplicated devotion children reserve for adults who remember how they like their sandwiches cut and never forget library day.
Marta is competent, warm, and approximately eighty percent responsible for the fact that I’ve managed to remain a functioning single parent while also having a career.
If she says she’s at the hospital with her mother, then she’s at the hospital with her mother, and the last thing I’m going to do is make her feel worse than she already does.
That doesn’t change the arithmetic.
No pickup. No after-school coverage. A hearing prep call at four. Caleb interviewing for staff at five-thirty. Me with a desk full of work and a daughter who has already had too much instability introduced into her life lately.
I type back before I can let my frustration curdle into something unfair.
Me:
Don’t apologize. Stay with your mother. We’ll figure it out here. Tell me if you need anything.
Three dots appear, disappear, then return.
Marta:
Thank you. Leonie said she can stay late if needed. So it’ll just be school pick up.
Leonie, our housekeeper, has become the human equivalent of structural reinforcement—quiet, capable, and impossible to adequately compensate for what she actually does.
But Leonie doesn’t drive.
Which means I either leave the office in the middle of the afternoon and blow up my schedule, or I ask my mother to do it, which she would, immediately, without complaint, and which I hate on principle because the number of favors I owe my mother has started to feel like its own line item.
My phone vibrates again.
This time a text from my father.
My father doesn’t text for pleasure. He texts the way he files motions: only when necessary, with minimal language, and the expectation that you’ll act on it immediately.
Father:
Preliminary hearing confirmed. November 12. 6 weeks. Call me when you’re free. We need to discuss strategy.
Six weeks.
The hearing is for temporary visitation—whether Kelsie gets supervised contact with Michaela while her attorneys prepare the larger petition to reverse the termination of her parental rights.
That trial is months away. But this hearing sets the tone, and if the judge grants interim access, Kelsie’s legal team will use it like a battering ram.
“Fucking hell.” I brace both hands against the counter and force my breathing even.
I have forty-two days to prove that my daughter is safest with me. Forty-two days to anticipate every lie Kelsie is going to tell and dismantle it before it lands. Forty-two days to keep my life, my work, and my child from becoming collateral damage in a case that should never exist.
Caleb appears in the kitchen doorway with his phone in one hand and coffee in the other. He takes one look at my face and says, “Dad?”
I hold up the screen.
He reads the text, jaw tightening. “Well. That’s sooner than ideal.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
He steps farther in, lowering his voice even though the only person here is Eddie, currently Googling whether inhaling printer smoke is grounds for workers’ compensation. “Six weeks is aggressive.”
“Because her lawyers want momentum.” I lock my phone and drop it onto the counter. “Short runway. Less time for us to develop evidence, more time for her to parade around as the reformed mother unjustly separated from her child.”
Caleb takes a sip of coffee. “Probably. Or the docket just opened up and the court hates us personally.”
“Comforting.”
“I try.”
He studies me for a beat. “You OK?”
“No.”
“Good. I’d be worried if you were.”
That gets a ghost of a laugh out of me. It dies quickly. “Marta’s out today. Her mother’s in the hospital. Which means I don’t have pickup.”
Caleb sets his mug down. “I can do it.”
“You have the Pritchard consult at three-thirty.”
“I can move it.”
“No. Keep it.” I scrub a hand over my face. “You already moved it once because the client wanted to spiritually prepare for reading a retainer agreement.”
Caleb snorts. “That is, in fairness, a taxing emotional journey.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“You say that like you enjoy making your life harder.”
“I don’t enjoy it. I’m just excellent at it.”
He leans a hip against the counter, studying me in that annoyingly accurate younger-brother way. “Call Mom.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because she probably has patients. And if not, she does also have a life.”
“So do you, and yours is actively on fire.”
“Along with the printer.”
He points a finger at me. “Exactly. Let the woman pick up her granddaughter from school. She loves Michaela. I’m told the feeling is mutual.”
I exhale through my nose. “I know.”
“Then what’s the issue?”
The issue is that every request feels like an admission that I’m barely keeping all the plates in the air.
That I’ve built a life dependent on precision and backup systems and routine, and all it takes is one hospital visit, one court date, one woman with very expensive attorneys, and the whole structure starts wobbling.
The issue is that I am tired of needing things.
Every request I file with the people who love me is a failure point in the structure I did not engineer and cannot unilaterally reinforce. My father raised us not to want. Not to need. I am, it turns out, not as disciplined as I was raised to be.
“Shit.” I pick up my phone again and scroll to my mother’s contact.
Caleb, mercifully, doesn’t comment. He just retrieves his coffee and heads back toward the conference room. “David?”
“Yeah?”
“We don’t need perfect. We need prepared.”
Then he disappears, leaving me alone with my phone and my pride.
My mother picks up on the second ring. “David? Is everything all right?”
Our parents trained us to assume a direct call during business hours means catastrophe.