40. Lady Justice
40
Lady Justice
Sophie
Be mine, and I’ll be yours.
Equal investment, equal risk, equal pain and equal pleasure.
Evan’s voice, calm and low, replays in my head like a song stuck on repeat, looping maddeningly, invading my mind when it should be clear and focused.
Really, I should have told him to fuck off.
Or laughed in his face.
Or maybe I should’ve kissed him anyway, dragged him into my bed, made him lose control—I know I could’ve, if I wanted.
Couldn’t I? I swallow against the knot in my throat.
This isn’t the time for this.
This is really not the time for this.
I catch a deep breath and hold it in my chest, steeling myself as I glance down at my notes, flipping through my notes even though I already know every word, every argument, every statistic I’ve spent weeks tattooing into my brain.
Focus, Sophie Sutton , I command myself coldly.
You have a job to do.
Laying my notes down on the lectern of old polished wood, I finally look up.
The lecture hall is packed.
Mr Park and Mr Callahan warned me it would be, but I still wasn’t expecting this .
Students crammed into seats, some even perched on the steps, murmuring amongst themselves as they wait for the presentation to begin, laptops and notebooks ready.
I spot a few familiar faces in the crowd: Mr Park, of course, sitting along a row of professors and lecturers.
A few people from HLR, whispering amongst themselves.
Alice, lounging back in her chair between two of her friends, looking especially studious with her reading glasses and her black hair pinned back.
And, sitting at the very back of the room despite spending the last month loudly discussing skipping this presentation because it’d be far too boring for them—Dahlia and Max.
Dahlia’s eyes are cast down, fingers picking at some invisible flaw on the edge of her skirt.
Max, on the other hand, looks well at ease, one leg lazily sprawled out, one arm thrown over the back of his chair.
His eyes are fixed on me.
I allow myself a small, private smile.
Good. Watch me.
Watch this.
“NDAs,” I begin, voice clear and crisp, cutting right through the hall, “non-disclosure agreements. Originally designed to protect businesses and intellectual property, but today? A legal gag. A tool. A way for the powerful to silence their victims.”
I pause.
A few murmurs ripple through the room.
Dahlia’s head lifts.
Max’s eyes fix on mine.
I turn the page in my notes.
“Let’s talk about what that actually looks like.”
Click .
A case study appears on the screen behind me, the highlighted name of a well-known music producer dominating the text.
The air in the room tightens almost imperceptibly, a silent ripple.
I picked my case studies specifically, strategically: this one, because it’s ongoing and firmly in the public eye.
I detail my case study step by step, picking away at the illusion of justice surrounding it, laying out case laws, landmark rulings, statistics and the real-life stories those statistics brush over.
I describe in stark, unemotional details the rooms where lawyers sat across from victims, dangling hush money over their heads, pitching payments as apologies rather than bribes.
I break down the language of these agreements, the way legal jargon itself is a clever tool used to shift power away from the people who need it most.
Click .
A new slide. A new name.
Marcel Roth.
The shift in the room is instant and undeniable this time.
There’s a rustle of recognition, the sharp intake of breath from those who understand the weight of what I’ve just done.
Roth isn’t just another case study.
He is one of ours , a man we’ve all met or been in the same room as at some point this year .
Students turn to each other in low, urgent whispers.
Even the professors are moving uncomfortably in their seats, swapping glances, tugging at their collars or leaning ever so slightly forward.
Marcel Roth is a man who’s built his reputation on excellence, a celebrated figure in our field, known for having mentored many Harvard students, some sitting right in this room—like Dahlia, whose eyes are wide and glassy and fixed on mine .
I hold her gaze.
“Unlike what we’d all like to believe—what we’re led to believe—NDAs don’t just protect Hollywood moguls and misbehaving celebrities. They protect the people we know. The respected, lauded men who built their careers on justice and the practice of law itself, the people who swore oaths to uphold it only to weaponise it. Marcel Roth is one such man: a decorated legal mind, a trusted mentor—and a known predator.”
Silence.
It’s almost a presence in the room: the weight of what I’m saying, like Lady Justice herself stands at my side, blindfolded and unsmiling, brandishing the sword, this time, rather than the scales.
“Over the past fifteen years, multiple women—junior associates, interns, even clients—have settled cases against Roth. His name is absent from headlines, but it’s everywhere in sealed court filings, in private arbitration records, in confidential settlements hidden behind layers of legal red tape. The same tools we study here, the same strategies we discuss in class, were used to ensure that his victims could never speak. That their careers could never recover. That their stories would never be told.”
Dahlia’s expression is impossible to read, somewhere between shock and something else.
The gleam on her cheeks could be tears or the glow of her bronzer.
I can’t tell from where I am.
But it doesn’t matter.
She’s just watched me crack open the gold cage of silence she and other women just like her have been trapped into.
She’s watched me declare open war on someone untouchable, someone who wields great power in the very field I’m going into.
What she feels and what she does, going forward, really doesn’t matter to me .
Marcel Roth is only the first of many, anyway.
“This isn’t an anomaly,” I tell the room.
“This isn’t one bad actor in an otherwise just system. This is the system. Marcel Roth’s name is just one of many. You could swap it out for a thousand other names—different city, different firm, different field—and the story wouldn’t change. Because when men like him get away with it once, they don’t stop. They never stop.”
Click .
A new slide.
Senator Fitzpatrick.
Not just his name: his face, too, his grey suit and pallid eyes and self-satisfied smile as he shakes hands with a former president.
The tension in the room crackles into something electric.
I speak calmly over the wave of whispers rippling through the lecture hall.
“Of course, NDAs aren’t just the domain of those who practise law.” My voice is steady.
“They’re most powerful in the hands of those who shape those laws at the highest of degrees. Even politicians need assistance to make themselves untouchable.”
All around the lecture hall, people are turning in their seats, craning their necks to look up to the top of the room.
There, Max has stiffened, his body as rigid and frozen as if rigor mortis has set in while he’s still alive.
His smirk is finally wiped clean.
His fingers are clamped on his pen, his jaw locking, his eyes on me wide and straining, as if he’s trying to strike me dead with the very force of his gaze.
But that’s always been his greatest mistake: thinking he has what it takes to bring me down.
“Senator Maximilian Fitzpatrick Senior has spent decades navigating allegations,” I continue, deliberately enunciating the senator’s full name so that anybody that’s failed to make the connection can be made aware.
“Each one has quietly disappeared behind a sealed settlement. The pattern is clear. The victims are real. The money always flows in the same direction, and the course of justice follows in the path money’s carved for it. Silence is powerful: its life is long. It has the ability to erase memories in its wake, to make people forget so that the cycle may continue ad infinitum .”
I step away from the lectern.
“NDAs were never meant to serve as get-out-of-jail-free cards for the privileged. And yet, time and time again, they do. These agreements, these legal mechanisms, these well-rehearsed suppression tactics: we study them here as tools of the profession, but it’s also our duty to question them. If we don’t interrogate their use, their consequences, then the truth is that we are complicit in their abuse. Complicit with men like Mr Roth and Senator Fitzpatrick.”
A final pause.
One last sword stroke of silence.
Then, I smile.
“Questions?”
At the end of my presentation, I accept my applause with a courteous smile, absorbing the reactions.
Dahlia is still tense and silent, hands clasped on her lap.
Alice meets my gaze across the lecture hall, her lips curled, blinking her dark eyes with a mean, feline sort of approval.
Some of my classmates from Harvard Law Review are on their feet, clapping uproariously.
Some students are already on their phones, typing out texts full of dramatic retellings and fresh gossip, ready to spread what they heard tonight far and wide.
Max hasn’t moved so much as a muscle.
His posture is still rigid, his usual sprawl gone.
He says nothing; he can’t.
There’s nothing left to say.
His face, normally so full of smug amusement, is utterly blank.
Except for his eyes.
Those pale eyes are fixed on mine, unblinking, seething with emotion.
Not fury, I realise.
Not even hatred. But something closer to shock or dismay—something like realisation.
I can almost see the way it hits him, hard and slow, an avalanche, too inevitable to run, too powerful to fight.
The game is over, he’s realising.
There’s no counterattack he can make, no blow he can strike that will outmatch the blow I’ve just dealt him.
I’ve won.
He’s been poking at me for almost two years trying to see if I’d bite, and I’ve ripped his head clean off.
A bloody kill, brutal and final.
He stands without addressing Dahlia, without even looking at her, or anybody else who’s watching him.
His throat bobs as he swallows, his fingers grip the edge of his seat.
He leaves under the limelight of hundreds of eyes, getting the attention he’s always loved so much in the only way he could never enjoy.
I watch his disappearing back and the door that closes on him.
And actually, I feel nothing for him.
No superiority, no hatred, not even pity.
I’ve imagined this moment before—hundreds of times.
I thought it would taste like a rich, complex wine on my tongue, but it doesn’t.
It tastes as clean and cold and neutral as water .
Because the rush of triumph I feel in this moment isn’t the one I expected.
It’s not the dizzying electric thrill of satisfied revenge.
It’s something quieter, calmer, deeper.
The odd, unexpected truth is that I don’t feel victorious because I crushed Maximilian Fitzpatrick.
The victory comes from the fact that what I did was right .
I spoke up against those who abuse power, I used my voice for those who’ve been silenced.
For once, I was able to tilt the scales of power, even if just for a moment.
Equal investment, equal risk, equal pain and equal pleasure.
Evan had said it like it was the simplest thing in the world.
Maybe it was. Maybe I was the one making things harder than they had to be.
For the first time, I finally know exactly where I’m going, what battles lie ahead of me.
And maybe I don’t have to face them all alone.