Chapter 1
Gianna
My mother was trying to kill me with kindness—one heaping plate of arroz con pollo at a time.
“You’re too thin,” she announced, studying me across the small dining table like a doctor assessing a difficult case. “Even models aren’t this thin. No man wants a stick figure.”
I nearly choked on my rice. “Mom. Did you seriously just body-shame me?”
“I’m not shaming. I’m observing.”
“You literally just said no man wants a stick figure.”
“It’s true.” She spooned another heap of rice onto my plate before I could protest. “Men like something to hold onto.”
“In this day and age? Really?” I pointed my fork at her. “I’m going to be a lawyer in one semester. I could sue you for this.”
Her eyes lit up with amusement. “Ah, so now my daughter is a lawyer and wants to sue her own mother? The woman who gave birth to her?”
“I’m considering it.”
“Eat your food first. Then we’ll discuss your lawsuit.”
Sunday dinners at my mother’s apartment had become a sacred routine.
Even during the seven years we’d worked for the Valdezes—when we spent most of our days at their estate in the guest house Hector had converted for us—we’d always kept our own place.
This place. The two-bedroom apartment in a quiet building in Queens that Hector had given us as part of Mom’s employment package.
The living room was modest but bright, with windows that actually let in light.
The kitchen was big enough for my mother to cook the way she loved to.
Two bedrooms so we each had our own space.
Hector had furnished it too, back when he’d hired her seven years ago.
Found her selling flowers on a street corner in Manhattan, picked out a single bloom—some rare orchid his late wife had loved—and decided on the spot that she should work for him instead.
My mother liked to say Hector Valdez saved our lives. She wasn’t wrong.
Back then, Mom’s hands had trembled so badly she could barely hold the flowers she was trying to sell.
The panic attacks came without warning, turning her into someone I didn’t recognize.
We’d been bouncing between shelters and cheap motels, and I’d been watching her disappear a little more each day.
Then Hector showed up, bought a flower, and gave us both a future.
“How’s school?” Mom asked, pulling me back to the present.
“Good. Just one more semester.”
Her face lit up. “One more semester.” She repeated it like a prayer she’d been waiting years to say out loud. “Mija, I’m so proud of you.”
Her words tightened something in my chest. I focused on my plate, pushing rice around with my fork because looking at her would make me cry and we’d already cried enough over this journey.
“Thanks, Mamá.”
“Your father would be proud too.”
I nodded, still not looking up. My father had been dead for ten years, gone before I’d even finished my first semester of law school the first time around. He never got to see me drop out. Never got to see me work just to keep us housed and fed. Never got to see me go back.
Maybe that was a blessing. Maybe not. I don’t know anymore.
“Eat,” she said again, gentler this time. “You need your strength.”
I ate because arguing with my mother about food was a battle I stopped fighting years ago. Besides, her arroz con pollo was objectively perfect—the kind of perfect that made you understand why people said food was love.
After dinner, I helped her clean up despite her protests. We worked in comfortable silence, her washing and me drying, falling into a rhythm we’d perfected over three decades of being each other’s primary person.
“You’re working too hard,” she said eventually.
“I’m fine.”
“You always say you’re fine.”
“Because I usually am.”
She handed me a plate, her dark eyes serious. “You don’t have to prove anything to anyone, you know. Not anymore.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
I dried the plate and set it in the cabinet. “Mamá, I’m really okay. I promise.”
She studied me for a long moment, then nodded. My mother had learned when to push and when to let things go. It was a survival skill we’d both developed.
By the time I left, the sun had set and the temperature had dropped. I pulled my jacket tighter and headed for the subway, already thinking about the case files waiting for me at home.
My studio apartment in Washington Heights was medium-sized and well-kept—one room that I’d organized over the past three years.
The bed tucked neatly against one wall, a kitchen table that doubled as my desk positioned near the window for natural light, a comfortable couch that still looked good as new.
The bathroom was compact but functional, and the whole place stayed warm in winter.
The severance check Hector had given me three years ago had been generous enough that I could afford decent rent and still have good furniture.
I spread case files across the kitchen table and settled in for what would probably be a long night.
Final semester or not, the legal aid clinic didn’t slow down just because I had exams coming up.
A family fighting a wrongful foreclosure in Brooklyn.
A woman whose landlord kept “forgetting” to fix the heat.
My phone buzzed just as I was deep into reviewing tenant rights documentation.
Sam’s name flashed across the screen.
I answered. “What?”
“Gianna Marie Pearson, did you just answer the phone with ‘what’ like I’m some kind of telemarketer? Is this how you treat your best friend? The man who held your hair back when you stress-vomited before Property Law finals?”
I smiled despite myself. “I was deep into a case.”
“You’re always deep into a case. It’s called obsession. We should get you help.” I heard rustling on his end, like he was pacing. “Please tell me you survived Sunday mom dinner without gaining fifteen pounds.”
“I survived. Barely. She told me no man wants a stick figure.”
Sam gasped so dramatically I had to pull the phone away from my ear. “In the year of our lord two thousand and twenty-five? Is your mother actively trying to give you a complex?”
“I threatened to sue her.”
“As you should. I’ll represent you. We can claim emotional distress.”
I’d met Sam during my first week at NYU, when we’d both reached for the same outdated textbook in the library and ended up arguing about whether property law was actually useful or just academic torture.
He won the argument by pointing out that housing law was property law applied to real people, and I’d won the textbook by getting there first. We’d been best friends ever since.
“How’s Tyler?” I asked.
“Insufferable. He wants to get a dog.”
“That’s sweet.”
“Sweet? He showed me pictures for an hour. Just dogs. Do you know how many breeds exist?” But his voice softened. “He had this look though.”
“You’re so gone for him.”
“Shut up. I’m not researching dog-friendly apartments.”
“You totally are.”
“Okay maybe I looked at one listing. But only because Tyler gets this stupid smile when he talks about it and I can’t say no to that smile.”
“That’s actually really sweet.”
“Stop. I have a reputation.” He sighed, but it sounded happy. “Okay, enough about my inability to be cynical. You coming to the thing on Wednesday?”
“What thing?”
“The lecture? Professor Rashford from Harvard? Civil rights litigation? Any of this ringing a bell?”
“Oh. Right. That”
“You forgot.”
“I didn’t forget. I just… have a lot happening right now.”
“Gianna, he literally argued Brown v. Board of Education II. He’s a legend. You have to come.”
“I’ll try.”
“That’s literally code for no.”
“It’s code for I’ll try.” I smiled even though he couldn’t see it. “I promise. If I can swing it, I’ll be there.”
We talked for another twenty minutes about nothing important—his upcoming interview with a firm in Midtown, my professor who kept assigning readings like we had no other classes, whether the bodega cat near campus was actually immortal or just really good at playing dead.
By the time we hung up, it was past ten and I still had two case files to review before tomorrow.
I made it through one before the words started swimming.
Monday morning arrived too fast and far too bright.
I dragged myself to campus, fueled by coffee and stubbornness, and headed straight for Professor Diane’s office. She’d sent an email last night asking me to come by first thing, which usually meant she had a new case to dump on my already overflowing plate.
Diane looked exhausted when I walked in—the kind of tired that came from fighting systems, not people. Her gray hair was pulled back in its usual neat bun, but there were shadows under her eyes that suggested she’d been up late working.
“Gianna.” She gestured to the chair across from her desk. “Sit.”
I sat, already bracing myself.
Diane had spent her entire career fighting housing inequity.
She was sharp as hell, took exactly zero nonsense from opposing counsel, and had a reputation for being both brilliant and terrifying.
She was also funny in this dry, cutting way that made you laugh even when you knew you probably shouldn’t.
“I’m assigning you a new case,” she said, sliding a thick folder across her desk.
I looked at it warily. “How bad?”
“Thirty-seven families facing coordinated displacement dressed up as ‘revitalization.’”
My stomach dropped. “That’s not the case. That’s a slow-motion massacre.”
“That’s real estate development in New York.” Her mouth curved without humor. “The building is in a working-class neighborhood. Longtime residents. Many of them are immigrants. The usual pattern—buy the building, claim it needs renovations, jack up the rent, force everyone out.”
I opened the folder and started reading. The building is in Brooklyn. The residents had been there for years, some of them decades. They’d formed a tenant association, tried to negotiate, gotten lawyers involved.
None of it had worked.
“This is textbook displacement,” I murmured, flipping through the documentation.
“It is.” Diane leaned back in her chair, watching me. “Which is why I want you on it. You know these tactics. You’ve seen them before.”
I had. More intimately than anyone in this office realized.
“Who’s the defendant?” I asked, already knowing it wouldn’t be an individual landlord. Corporate entities always hid behind LLCs and shell companies.
“Development firm.” Diane reached across the desk and flipped to the last page of the filing.
I looked down at the company name.
Devlin Holdings.
The folder slipped from my hands before I even registered moving.
Papers scattered across Diane’s desk, case files and affidavits and tenant testimonies spreading in chaos. I stared at them, at the name printed across the top of the corporate filing, and my lungs forgot how to work.
“Gianna?” Diane’s voice sounded distant. “You alright?”
I forced myself to breathe. To pull air into lungs that suddenly felt too small. To focus on something other than the name that had just upended my entire world.
Devlin Holdings.
“I’m fine,” I heard myself say, even though the room felt slightly tilted.
Diane studied me with those sharp eyes that missed nothing. “You sure? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Maybe I had.
“I’m fine,” I repeated, gathering the scattered papers with hands that shook slightly. “Just surprised. This is a big case.”
“It is.” She watched me carefully. “Can you handle it?”
“Yeah,” I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. “I can handle it.”
A lie I hoped would become true.
Diane nodded, but something in her expression suggested she didn’t entirely believe me.
I didn’t entirely believe me either.