Chapter 3
The jury has been deliberating for four hours when Abigail decides she can't sit on that hallway bench a second longer.
She stands, tugs her blazer into place with a sharp pull, and walks to the window at the far end.
From the fourth floor of the federal courthouse in the District of Columbia, she can see the parking lot, the wet street, and some guy wrestling with an umbrella the wind has decided to flip inside out.
She watches him for thirty seconds, then looks away, because she can't afford distractions—not even the pointless kind.
Her client has spent eighteen months facing corporate fraud charges that Abigail knows, with the certainty that comes from nearly fifteen years of experience, aren't going to stick.
The case is solid and her arguments have been flawless, but juries are unpredictable, and Abigail has been at this long enough not to celebrate anything before the judge opens the envelope.
Her phone buzzes. It's Marcus.
Marcus: What time are you getting home tonight?
Abigail reads the message and locks her screen.
Marcus, her husband, knows perfectly well that when a jury is deliberating, she doesn't get home at any particular hour.
The fact that he keeps asking isn't curiosity—it's his way of reminding her he exists, and Abigail finds that sadder than irritating.
She'll answer when she has something to say.
The verdict doesn't come in until seven fifteen. Not guilty on all counts.
Her client, a fifty-two-year-old man with completely white hair who has aged five years over the course of the trial, squeezes her hand with both of his, eyes bright.
"I don't know how to thank you, Abigail," he says, his voice breaking.
"You don't have to thank me," she says, squeezing back. "This is what I'm here for. Go get some rest. It's all over now."
She means it, and at the same time she means it from behind the professional distance she's cultivated for so long that she can no longer tell where the distance ends and where she begins.
In the parking lot, her colleague James Whitfield is waiting, leaning against the hood of his car with two coffees in hand.
James has been at Mercer & Cole, the firm where they both work, for eight years—though not in the same spot she's in.
He's a senior associate. Abigail is the strongest candidate for the next partner slot, something everyone at the firm takes as a given except the committee that has to vote on it, which has been stringing her along for two years with the easy patience of people who know they hold the power and are in no hurry to use it.
"Not guilty," Abigail says before James can open his mouth.
James lifts one of the cups in a silent toast.
"I knew it the day you took the case," he says, handing her the coffee. "How are you doing?"
"Fine."
James raises his eyebrows and tilts his head.
"Fine as in actually fine, or fine as in you don't want to talk about it?"
Abigail takes a sip. The coffee is too hot, but she's grateful for it.
"Just fine, James."
He knows her well enough not to push. He nods toward her.
"Mercer wants to see you first thing tomorrow."
Abigail lowers her cup.
"Did he say why?"
"He didn't say anything—you know how he is—but," James pauses, "there are rumors Harrison is stepping down sooner than expected."
Harrison. The firm's most senior partner, sixty-eight years old, three bypasses, and a legendary stubbornness that has kept him from retiring five years past the point where any reasonable person would have.
If Harrison steps down, there's an opening.
And if there's an opening, everyone at the firm knows whose name sits at the top of the list.
"Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves," Abigail says. She's the type who prefers to talk about things once they're done.
"I'm not getting ahead of anything, I'm just passing along information," James says with a smile. "Do whatever you want with it."
Abigail nods and takes another sip of coffee before saying goodbye to James and heading out.
The drive home is thirty minutes on the highway, which at that hour has the kind of thick, slow traffic Abigail actually appreciates because it gives her time to sit still without anyone asking anything of her.
She puts on music—something instrumental—and drives with one hand on the wheel and the other resting against the window, her chestnut bob as perfectly in place as it was that morning, because there are certain things about Abigail Lawson that simply don't come undone.
She's thirty-nine. She thinks about that now, without quite knowing why—maybe because winning cases that would have felt extraordinary ten years ago now just feels normal, and that should feel like something, but it doesn't. Thirty-nine, the most capable attorney at a firm where she still has to wait for a committee to decide whether she deserves a seat at their table.
A house in Georgetown worth three times what they paid for it.
A marriage that runs the way well-oiled machinery runs when no one has asked in a long time what it's actually for.
Thirty-nine, and the only thing that truly makes her pulse spike is something she can't tell anyone.
She changes lanes and passes a truck.
Marcus has already eaten by the time she gets home.
There's a plate covered on the counter with a note on top that reads left it in the oven in Marcus's round, careful handwriting—the kind he brings to everything: writing, talking, existing.
A man with no sharp edges, who never raises his voice, who never does anything entirely wrong or entirely right.
Abigail puts the plate in the microwave, and while she waits she leans against the counter with her arms crossed. Marcus is in the living room watching something on TV, feet up on the coffee table and a glass of wine in his hand, and when he hears the microwave he turns around.
"Did you win?" he asks, as if he doesn't already know.
"Yes."
"That's great." He smiles, that warm, uncomplicated smile of his. "Are you happy?"
Sometimes Abigail thinks her husband is an idiot, especially when he asks questions this absurd—more like a teenager going through the motions than a grown man.
"I'm tired," she says.
"Sit down, I'll pour you some wine."
"No, stay there. I'll eat by myself."
Marcus opens his mouth and closes it again.
He hasn't argued that point, or any other, in years.
At some point they stopped eating dinner together and neither of them marked the exact moment—it simply happened, the way things happen in marriages that die slowly: without noise, without drama, without one defining scene you can point to and say that was it.
"Mercer wants to see me tomorrow," Abigail says from the kitchen. "About the Harrison thing."
Marcus appears in the doorway with his glass, wearing the expression of someone trying not to look too interested.
"Harrison's retiring?"
"Maybe." Abigail shrugs and glances at him sideways. Definitely an idiot.
"Maybe it's finally time they make you partner," he says with a smile, and Abigail knows the smile is genuine. Their marriage is over, but in their own way they still care about each other, and she knows he's honestly happy for her.
"Nothing's been decided yet," she cuts in. "And even if it had, the committee takes months to vote."
"I know, but you've been waiting for this for two years." He takes a step toward the kitchen. "You deserve it more than anyone at that firm and we both know it."
Abigail looks at him for a moment. Marcus has been at the firm longer than she has—partner for six years—and there's something faintly uncomfortable about having her husband be the one to validate her worth, as if she needs his stamp of approval to make it real.
But she says nothing, because she doesn't feel like arguing.
"We'll see," she says, and picks up her plate to carry it to her study.
Her study is the room she loves most in the whole house.
She chose it herself and decorated it her way: floor-to-ceiling shelves along the back wall, a dark wood desk, and a floor lamp in the corner that throws warm, low light.
Marcus respects that space with the survival instinct of a man who has learned there are places his wife needs to inhabit alone.
Abigail eats while she goes through emails for the Vega case, which starts next week and is going to be complicated in a different way from the last ones—not because of the evidence, but because of the client.
A man with too much money and too little patience, who has spent three weeks second-guessing every one of Abigail's tactical decisions with the condescension of someone who thinks paying a lot means knowing more.
When she finishes eating and answers the most urgent emails, she closes her laptop.
And then, because she has nothing left to distract herself with, she opens the right-hand drawer of her desk and takes out the paper planner that never leaves that room.
There's nothing incriminating in it—just a planner with dates and notes, Abigail's tight, small handwriting filling the margins—but if someone knew how to read it carefully, if someone recognized the pattern she has developed without ever meaning to, they'd see something.
Richard's birthday, her father's, circled in red. Carol's—Eleanor's mother's—circled in blue. Hers and Eleanor's circled in black and crossed out with an X in the center, because even her subconscious makes her mark things as forbidden.
She has the Christmas party marked since October, too, and Thanksgiving with a star since September.
These aren't reminders. Abigail doesn't need reminders for dates she's had carved into her bones for twenty years. They're how she keeps track of what truly matters, and that produces enough shame in her that the planner is paper and doesn't exist on any device anyone could see.
She flips to next month. Richard's birthday has its usual circle. Abigail looks at it for a moment and closes the planner.
She doesn't text Eleanor. She never does unless it's something urgent involving their parents—an illness, an accident, something that can't wait.
For everything else, there's no need for messages or confirmations.
The day simply comes and they're both there.
They've operated this way for twenty years—no kisses, no calls, just showing up to do what they can't help doing no matter how hard they try, though they stopped trying after that night in Abigail's car.
Abigail knows Eleanor will be at Richard's birthday the same way Eleanor knows she'll be there.
And they both know what will happen afterward.
Somewhere in that house that smells like jasmine, while their husbands drink whiskey with no idea what's happening a few feet away and Richard and Carol go on being the kind of couple that finds each other across a room, the two of them surrender to the worst secret either of them keeps.
Abigail Lawson has a theory about herself that she has been refining for twenty years and has never shared with anyone—not with James, who knows her better than anyone at the firm, and not with her former therapist, whom she stopped seeing four years ago, when the sessions started getting too close to territory she wasn't ready to explore.
The theory is that there are two versions of herself.
The first exists every day. The attorney, the partner candidate, the functional wife, the thirty-nine-year-old woman who wins impossible cases, eats alone in her study, and sleeps on the left side of a bed she shares with a man she doesn't want.
That version is competent, efficient, completely real, and at the same time not quite enough—like a high-resolution photo of something that turns out, in person, to be much smaller than it looked.
The second version only exists in very specific, limited moments.
Christmas in Pittsburgh. Richard's birthday, or Carol's.
Theirs. Thanksgiving. Even Halloween, though her husband doesn't understand why Abigail wants to go when in the end everyone else dresses up and leaves the house—everyone except her and Eleanor.
That version of Abigail is the one who actually breathes, the one whose pulse races in places it shouldn't, the one who loses control at a speed she would find unacceptable in any other context.
That version only exists when she's with Eleanor Montgomery.
And what's hardest to admit—what she crosses out in the planner and buries under work and cases and urgent emails—is that she has spent twenty years waiting for those moments with a desperation that hasn't faded over time but grown more concentrated, more urgent, closer to a physiological need than to anything you could call by a decent name.
She doesn't call it anything. But Abigail counts the days—twenty-six until the next trip home to her parents.
When she goes upstairs, Marcus is already asleep, and Abigail slips into bed carefully, without a sound, and lies there staring at the ceiling in the dark.
Twenty-six days until Richard's birthday, and she already feels it—the anticipation, the quickened pulse, the vertigo, the shortness of breath, and that intense, low ache between her legs that dampens her underwear.
Marcus shifts beside her and murmurs something she doesn't bother trying to hear. Abigail lies still, her dark green eyes open in the dim light, the twenty-six days pressing down on her chest in a way that makes her anxious.
That's the worst part.
It's not a bad kind of anxiety—it's the kind that makes her desperate for the days to pass quickly, the kind that comes from wanting to hear Eleanor's muffled moans against her ear, or feel her nails digging into her back when she comes.
It's not a bad kind of anxiety. It's a dirty one.