Chapter 13
The brief sat open on Elizabeth’s desk, pages and pages of procedural argument she could have recited in her sleep.
She’d built the motion to dismiss from scratch, every citation checked twice, every counterargument mapped and dismantled before opposing counsel could draw breath to raise it.
Tomorrow morning, Judge Ramos’s courtroom.
Nine sharp. She’d argued in front of Ramos six times.
Won five. The one she’d lost had been a standing issue, not a failure of substance.
She read the same paragraph for the fourth time.
Kelsey’s thumb against her cheekbone.
Elizabeth closed her eyes, a warmth blooming in her chest.
She opened her eyes. Read the paragraph again.
Plaintiffs have not plausibly alleged
The slow drag of skin against skin. The way the pad of Kelsey’s thumb had swept downward along her skin.
Elizabeth pushed back from the desk. The chair glided half a foot on the wheels until it struck the cabinet at her back.
Tuesday. It was Tuesday. The party had been Saturday. Four days, and her brain had not moved on.
She stood. Crossed to the window. The angular sprawl of Midtown lay out below her in glass and concrete, with the distant gray thread of the Hudson visible in the distance.
She braced one hand against the frame and stared at Columbus Circle, the traffic rounding it in its slow, predictable loop, and willed her nervous system to do the same.
Four days. She’d lost cases in less time and moved on.
She’d received the divorce papers, read them at this desk, signed them, and been in court the following morning, arguing a breach of fiduciary duty claim with a voice that didn’t crack once.
That was what she did. She compartmentalized. She filed. She moved forward.
But she hadn’t gone to the coffee shop.
Monday morning, she’d turned left instead of right on Broadway.
Walked four extra blocks to a place she’d never been, some overlit chain with music too loud for seven a.m., and ordered a cappuccino that arrived wet, sweet, and made with regular milk because the kid behind the register had already forgotten the almond by the time he picked up the pitcher.
This morning, same thing. Different chain. The cappuccino was closer to correct, but still wrong; the foam was too thick, the temperature not quite right. She’d drunk it anyway at her desk while reading depositions.
She couldn’t face 72 & Brew. Couldn’t walk in and stand at that counter and watch Kelsey’s hands work the portafilter and hear that voice, the bright one, the café one, say the usual?
while Elizabeth’s traitorous memory supplied the other voice.
The low one. The garden one. Just me. Not the doors, not whoever’s watching. Me.
The city moved below her. Taxis. Buses. People who were not standing at their office windows at 2:47 on a Tuesday afternoon, failing to concentrate on a motion to dismiss because a woman seventeen years their junior had touched their face four days ago and not kissed them.
She had wanted to be kissed—badly, recklessly—and the truth of it sat there in her throat like a pill she couldn’t swallow.
She had tilted her chin up. Her lips had parted, and if Kelsey had closed those last few inches of distance, Elizabeth would have let her. Would have kissed her back. In front of Grace.
And she was paying this woman five thousand dollars to pretend.
Elizabeth turned from the window. Sat back down. Pulled the brief toward her and uncapped her pen.
Plaintiffs have not plausibly alleged that Defendant’s conduct constituted a breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing
Good. Fine. She could do this. She’d been doing this for years.
Before Kelsey, before the party, before the garden, before the particular catastrophe of discovering at forty-eight that her nerve endings still functioned.
Before all of it, there was this. Case law.
Argument. The clean, binary satisfaction of winning.
She wrote three notes in the margin. Cross-reference with the Second Circuit holding on causation. Flag the plaintiff’s expert report for Daubert issues. Check whether Ramos had ruled on similar standing questions in the last eighteen months.
Her phone buzzed against the desk.
Elizabeth glanced at the screen.
Hey! Quick question. What color are you wearing to the wedding? Don’t want us to clash
Elizabeth stared at the text. The smiley face at the end of it.
The exclamation point after Hey that was so perfectly, irritatingly Kelsey, bright and easy and uncomplicated, as though Saturday night hadn’t happened, as though they’d parted ways after a pleasant professional engagement and not after nearly sixty minutes in a garden where Elizabeth had lost temporary custody of her pulse rate.
She set the phone face down on the desk. Returned to the brief. Read two more paragraphs. Wrote nothing.
Then she picked the phone back up.
The question was fair. Reasonable. The kind of coordination detail that actual couples handled weeks in advance and that she, in her obsessive focus on backstory and rehearsed anecdotes and plausible intimacy, had completely overlooked.
What to wear. Basic logistics. Kelsey was being practical.
Professional. Honoring the terms of their agreement.
Elizabeth’s thumbs hovered over the keyboard.
Midnight blue.
And sent it. No pleasantries. No exclamation point. No emoji.
Three dots appeared almost immediately.
Perfect. Thank you!
She put the phone back down. The screen went dark.
At least she already had her dress picked out.
A clean-lined column dress with a high neckline and with an open back, structured enough to read as serious, soft enough in the fabric to move when she moved.
She’d bought it because it made her look sharp without looking like she was trying, which, if she was honest with herself, meant she’d bought it so Grace would see her and think she looks good without the satisfaction of knowing Elizabeth had made any effort at all.
That calculation felt distant now. Clinical.
A move from a chess game she’d been playing against a version of Grace who still occupied enough space in her head to justify the strategy.
But standing in the garden Saturday night, Grace’s presence through the glass doors had contracted to a pinpoint of light at the far edge of Elizabeth’s awareness, and the only thing filling the frame had been Kelsey’s face, tilted up, those brown eyes warm and steady in the string lights, and the devastating, disarming fact that Kelsey looked at her like she meant it.
She doesn’t mean it. Elizabeth pressed her pen hard against the legal pad, the nib denting a small crater into the yellow paper.
She’s a thirty-one-year-old barista who agreed to a job.
She’s good at the job. That’s what you’re seeing.
Skill. Performance. The same talent she uses to make small talk with strangers and remember regulars’ orders.
She capped the pen.
Tomorrow, she would stand in a courtroom where the rules were clear and the stakes were professional and the only thing that mattered was whether the law supported her position, and she would argue this motion with the surgical clarity that had made her name at this firm, and she would win, because that was the one arena where her competence wouldn’t fail her.
And then Saturday would come. And she would pick Kelsey up, and they would drive two hours to the Hudson Valley, and she would walk into Grace’s wedding with a beautiful woman on her arm. And then it would be over. Done.
They would both go back to their lives. Elizabeth to this office, this view, this clean and ordered solitude. Kelsey to the counter at 72 & Brew, smiling and making someone else’s morning better with that bright, easy voice.
And Elizabeth would find a new coffee shop.