Chapter 4
LITTLE BOMB
The café was my idea, and I’m already regretting it.
It’s a place in East Sacramento I’ve been to twice—once with Liv for her birthday, once alone with a library book when Tabitha was at preschool and I needed two hours of silence.
Neutral ground. Not Jermaine’s territory, not the downtown restaurants where firm people circulate.
I picked a table by the window because I wanted light and an exit, and now I’m sitting here with my hands wrapped around a latte I can’t drink, watching the door.
Catherine Park’s voice in my head: Don’t contact the client. It introduces variables I can’t control.
I’m here anyway. Because Catherine is brilliant and strategic and correct about almost everything, but she doesn’t know Jasper.
She doesn’t know the way he once crouched down at a firm holiday party and asked Tabitha what Santa was bringing, and then listened—actually listened—while she described a stuffed unicorn for three solid minutes.
Jasper’s trust isn’t a legal abstraction.
It’s a person. And that person deserves a face, not a form letter.
The door opens.
Jasper walks in and I know him immediately—tall, dark suit, silver at the temples, the kind of posture that says old money without saying a word. He scans the room and finds me, and his face does something Jermaine’s hasn’t done in years: it warms.
“Mara.” He reaches the table and extends his hand, but it turns into something closer to a touch—his palm covering mine for a second, deliberate. “It’s good to see you.”
“You too.” My voice is steady. I’m surprised by that.
He pulls back the chair across from me, unbuttons his suit jacket, signals the waitress with the ease of a man used to being attended to. Not arrogant—just native. He orders an espresso and turns to me with his full attention.
“How’s Tabitha?” he asks. “Starting first grade soon?”
“Kindergarten.” I manage a smile. “She’s five going on thirty-five. She told her preschool teacher last week that she needed a ‘mental health day.’“
Jasper laughs—a real one, from his chest. “She gets that from you. Her father would never admit to needing one.” He leans back. “And how are you?”
The question lands differently than he means it. Or maybe exactly how he means it—there’s something in his eyes, an attention that doesn’t slide off me the way Jermaine’s does. I take a breath and set my latte down because my hands want to shake and I will not let them.
“That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.”
His espresso arrives. He thanks the waitress without breaking eye contact with me, and the small competence of that—holding two social obligations at once without dropping either—makes something in my chest tighten.
“I need to tell you something,” I say. “But first—can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“You’ve been with Jermaine’s firm for what, twelve years?”
“Fourteen.” He lifts the espresso, takes a sip. “My father moved the account to Jermaine’s predecessor. When Jermaine made partner, he inherited us. I stayed because of him specifically.”
“Why specifically?”
Jasper sets the cup down and is quiet for a moment. The café hums around us—the espresso machine, a couple arguing gently about parking, silverware against ceramic. When he speaks, his voice has shifted. Lower. More private.
“My grandfather built our family’s wealth from nothing,” he says.
“Textiles, then real estate. By the time my father was born, the family office managed more money than most people see in ten lifetimes.” He turns the espresso cup on its saucer, a slow rotation.
“When my father was twenty-two, his own business partner—a man who’d been at his wedding, who was godfather to my aunt—embezzled nearly everything.
Forged signatures. The works. By the time the auditors caught it, there was nothing left but the house and the name. ”
My breath stops. Not because of the story—because of what I’m about to do to the man telling it.
“My father spent thirty years rebuilding what his father built,” Jasper says.
“Thirty years of seventy-hour weeks and missed vacations and never once taking a risk he hadn’t vetted three times.
He died four years ago. Left me the account and one piece of advice: the only risk you can’t survive is trusting the wrong person. ”
The café noise fades. There’s just Jasper’s face and the pressure building in my sinuses and the phone in my purse that’s about to change everything.
“That’s why I chose Jermaine,” he says. “Not his firm. Him. Because I believed he was someone I could trust completely.” His eyes settle on mine. “Why are you asking me this, Mara?”
My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my wrists, my throat, the backs of my knees.
I reach into my purse. Pull out my phone.
The screen lights up in my hand and the first photograph is already loaded—I queued it in the parking lot, sitting in my car for ten minutes with the engine running, making sure the evidence was in order because the woman who found those emails on a Sunday night is not the woman who shows up unprepared.
“Jermaine has been sharing your confidential information,” I say. “Settlement figures. Case strategy. Account details. With a paralegal at Harper & Locke.”
The words leave my body and the room changes.
Jasper doesn’t move. His hand is still on the espresso cup, his posture still open, but something behind his eyes goes out—like a light switching off and a different one switching on, colder and harder and infinitely more precise.
“Show me,” he says.
I turn the phone toward him. The first email—Jermaine to Lauren, the Hargrove settlement numbers, the subject line quick question that isn’t quick and isn’t a question.
Jasper reads. His jaw tightens. I swipe to the next.
Case strategy for his account, sent from Jermaine’s personal email to a woman at the firm that’s been trying to poach his business for years. Swipe. Another. Another.
He reads each one. He doesn’t rush. The warmth that walked through the door—the man who asked about Tabitha, who laughed at her mental health day, who told me about his grandfather with his voice low and private—has been replaced by something I’ve never seen before.
Someone carved from granite. Someone whose family lost everything once and swore it would never happen again.
“How long?” he asks.
“Eight months that I’ve found.”
He sits back. His hand leaves the espresso cup, and I watch his fingers close slowly into a fist on the table—not anger, not yet. Control. The disciplined compression of a man deciding exactly how much force to apply.
“Thank you for telling me yourself,” he says. His voice is quiet. Very level. “Most people wouldn’t have.”
“I need to make a phone call.”
Jasper says it the way he’s said everything in the last ten minutes—measured, precise, every word placed like a stone in a wall.
He hasn’t raised his voice. He hasn’t asked me about the affair, because I haven’t told him about the affair, and either he knows or he understands that I came here with one story and the other one is mine to keep.
“Right now?” I ask.
“Right now.” He pulls his phone from his jacket. “I’d like you to stay for this. You should hear it.”
My pulse is in my ears. Wanting this and watching it happen are two different things, and the second Jasper dials, the fuse I lit on my couch last Saturday night finally reaches the charge.
He puts the phone to his ear. One ring. Two. I can hear the faint buzz of the line connecting, and then a voice—muffled, male, professional. The managing partner. It has to be.
“Richard.” Jasper’s voice is calm the way a surgeon’s hands are calm—not relaxed, perfected. “This is Jasper Massey. I’m calling about a matter that requires your immediate attention.”
A pause. The voice on the other end says something I can’t make out.
“You have a partner,” Jasper says, “who has been sharing my confidential information with a paralegal at your rival firm. Settlement figures. Case strategy. Privileged client details. For at least eight months.” Each sentence lands like a closed door.
No inflection, no waver. “I’m pulling my account effective immediately.
I expect a full investigation, and I expect to hear from you by end of day. ”
The silence from the other end is so total I can hear the café espresso machine cycling behind us.
Then the voice starts—fast, pitched higher than before, the scramble of a man whose biggest client just detonated a bomb in his ear. I can’t hear the words, but I can hear the tone: damage control. The verbal equivalent of throwing your body on a grenade.
Jasper listens. His face doesn’t change. His eyes move to me once—brief, steady—and then back to the window, and when the managing partner finishes talking, Jasper speaks with a finality that makes the hair on my arms stand up.
“Richard. I’m not looking for an explanation.
I’m informing you of a fact. Eight months of emails exist between your partner and a paralegal at Harper & Locke containing my privileged financial information.
I have seen them. If I do not hear from you by five o’clock today with a concrete plan of action, my next call is to the state bar.
And the one after that is to my litigation counsel. ”
He hangs up.
The phone goes face-down on the table, and for the first time since I showed him the emails, the granite cracks—just a fraction.
A muscle in his jaw pulses. His eyes close for two seconds, and I can see the cost move through him: fourteen years of trust. His father’s account.
The one person at that firm he believed in.
I don’t speak. I wait.
Jasper opens his eyes and looks at me. The warmth is back, but it’s layered over something else, something that wasn’t there an hour ago.
“My grandfather would have liked you,” he says.
“Why?”
“He always said the person who tells you the hard truth is the only one worth keeping in the room.” He holds my gaze, and there’s a stillness between us—not the empty kind, but the kind that hums, that has voltage in it. “You didn’t have to come here.”
“Yes I did.”
“No. You didn’t. That’s what makes this matter.”
He insists on walking me to my car. The afternoon sun is flat and white against the parking lot, and he doesn’t touch me—doesn’t put his hand on my back or reach for my arm—but the space between us has narrowed to something that feels deliberate. Chosen.
At my car, he stops. “Whatever else is going on—and I suspect there’s more than what you told me today—you should know that what you did in there took extraordinary courage.”
“I didn’t risk anything,” I say. “Jermaine risked everything. I’m just the one who found out.”
Something crosses his face—the shadow of a smile. He nods. Steps back.
“I’ll be in touch. Drive safe.”
Jermaine is on the couch with Tabitha when I walk in, watching something animated.
He glances up, says “hey,” goes back to the screen.
I say “hey” back and go to the kitchen and start unloading the dishwasher, because that’s what I do now—come home from detonating my husband’s career and put away the clean plates.
Tabitha’s bedtime takes forever. Three books, two glasses of water, a negotiation about whether her stuffed elephant can sleep on the pillow. I lie next to her until her breathing deepens, then ease off the bed and close her door and stand in the hallway, in the dark, and let myself feel it.
What I did today. What I set in motion.
My phone buzzes in my back pocket.
Jasper. Not a text—a call. I glance toward the living room. The TV is still on. I step into the bathroom, close the door, sit on the edge of the tub.
“Hello?”
“It’s me.” His voice in my ear, closer than it was across the café table. “I’m not calling about the case.”
My chest does something complicated. “Okay.”
“You did a brave thing today, Mara.” A pause. “Are you okay?”
Am I okay. The question no one has asked me—not like this, not stripped of agenda, not in a voice that sounds like it actually wants the answer.
Liv asked, but that’s her job. Catherine asked, but Catherine is my attorney.
This is a man with no obligation calling to ask if a woman he watched rip her own life open is still standing.
“I don’t know,” I say. The truth slips out before I can edit it. “I think I’m just—in it.”
“You are. And it’s going to get harder before it gets better.” That pause again. Loaded. “But you’re not in it alone. I want you to know that.”
The bathroom is dark. Jermaine is twenty feet away on the couch. My daughter is sleeping down the hall. And the crack in my chest that’s been sealed since Saturday night—the one I locked down with fury and strategy and thirty-three screenshots—opens just enough to let something warm through.
“Thank you,” I say.
“If you need anything, call me. I’m serious. Goodnight, Mara.”
“Goodnight.”
I hang up. Sit in the dark for another minute.
Then I flush the toilet—alibi, habit—and walk past my husband without looking at him, and lie in the dark on my side of the California king, and think about a man who called me brave and a husband who told me to make a little effort, and the distance between those two things is the distance between the woman I was and the woman I’m becoming.