Chapter 5
Kelsi
When she was a child, she dreamed of working here. Banksy had brought her to work with her some days to show her what a day in the life of a prosecutor looked like, and she’d fallen in love with the drama, the stakes, and the advocacy of it.
Of course, that had been before the incident. Instead of coming here as planned, she’d run from anything to do with this town and fled to Virginia Beach, where she at least had Abby in her corner.
Now she was finally returning to this building and the career she’d dreamed of.
She was excited as she stepped out of her car, free of first-day jitters, her travel coffee cup and purse in hand.
She strolled through security and made her way up to the third floor, where the commonwealth’s attorney’s office was located.
Without an employee badge, she pressed the buzzer to be admitted.
A tinny voice came out of the speaker. “This is Cat. How may I help you?”
“Hi, Cat! It’s Kelsi Cameron, here for my first day.”
“Right, of course! I’m going to buzz you through now. Just walk through and I’m the first desk you’ll come to.”
The light on the intercom system next to the door flashed from red to green, and Kelsi heard the mechanical lock disengage. She grabbed the handle, turned it, and stepped into the office.
The hallway before her was carpeted, worn in the middle where people walked over it daily, and carried a musty smell that betrayed its age.
Kelsi took a deep breath and walked through the short hallway, admiring the pictures on the walls of previous employees of the office, spotting Banksy in many of them.
As she reached the end, she stopped in front of the desk, peering over the elevated countertop and spying who must have been Cat sitting in a massive ergonomic desk chair.
She smiled when she saw Kelsi and pushed away from the desk. Cat slowly stood, one hand on her stomach—her very pregnant stomach, Kelsi noticed with slight surprise.
She was petite, and Kelsi guessed, based on where the top of her head hit the bottom of Kelsi’s chin, that she must have been barely five feet tall.
Her face was young, and she looked familiar, probably a few years behind Kelsi in school, but in a small town like Oyster Shoals, everyone was familiar.
“Hi, Kelsi! I’m so excited you’re here!” She walked around the desk and laced her arm through Kelsi’s, hooking them together at the elbow and dragging her down the hallway.
“It is so nice to have another woman around this office. There are too many men and none of them appreciate gossiping with me. We are going to be best friends—I can feel it.”
Kelsi blinked slowly, trying to process the sheer energy radiating off Cat. She smiled at her, though, and confessed, “You didn’t hear it from me, but I do love a good gossip sesh to go with my morning coffee.”
Cat tipped her head back and laughed loudly, patting her arm. “Yes, we’ll get along just fine.”
She continued dragging Kelsi further through the office, which was made up of several cubicles behind Cat’s desk in an open area and six doors set in the walls on the periphery.
She spotted a few people bent over their desks, typing out emails or scanning through files.
They all smiled and waved, but nobody called out an introduction as Cat kept a tight grip on her arm and a quick pace through the area.
A few of the doors they passed had nameplates, but two were empty.
Cat led her to one of the unnamed doors, throwing it open with a flourish of her arm that was more ceremonious than the situation required.
“Welcome to your new home!”
Kelsi looked around, sparing the office a quick glance.
It looked pretty standard. A large mahogany desk sat in the center of the room with a rolling chair behind it, and there were a couple filing cabinets on one wall with criminal law treatises, casebooks, and the current Code of Virginia stacked on top.
What she immediately loved, however, was the big window on the far wall.
She finally managed to disentangle her arm from Cat’s death grip and walked over to the window.
Sure, the view looked over the parking lot, but it was infinitely better than her previous office, which had basically been a converted closet and had no windows at all.
“What do you think?” Cat smiled at her expectantly, bouncing on her toes with her excitement.
“It’s perfect.”
“Great!” Cat positively beamed at Kelsi before glancing down at her watch.
“All right, well, I need to take you in to meet with Banksy. She wants to talk to you. But once you’re done with her, I’ll get you set up with an employee badge and logged in to our systems.” She gestured to Kelsi to follow her and they walked back out into the main office to the door at the very back.
“Most of our stuff is still paper. We’re a little behind the times, but since I started, we’ve been trying to get more technology incorporated and finally bring this place into the twenty-first century. ”
“Sounds great.” Kelsi preferred physical files over electronic files, anyway. She liked being able to spread everything out around her so she could literally see the bigger picture of the case.
Cat knocked on the door as Kelsi stared at the Christine Banks nameplate affixed to it. A muffled “come in” sounded from inside, and Cat pushed the door open to reveal the office within, which, Kelsi noted immediately, was much larger than Kelsi’s new space.
The familiar woman behind the desk had short gray hair cut into a severe bob.
Once she’d grown a streak of gray, she’d given up dyeing it brown.
Her dark-brown eyes, hidden behind a pair of horn-rimmed black glasses, looked as intelligent as always and were trained on Kelsi.
She smiled while standing up to greet her.
The slate-gray skirt and blazer she wore were sleek and polished, and black pumps shone on her feet as she walked around the desk toward the younger women.
She gave Kelsi a hug, embracing her tightly and telling her, “I’m so glad we finally have you in this office, let alone back in town. Your mom and I have been so excited the past few weeks knowing you were coming back.”
Kelsi smiled at the woman as she stepped back from her and returned to sit behind her desk.
She’d known Banksy (everyone learned very quickly not to call her Christine) since she was six years old, when Banksy first moved to town.
She was about a decade younger than Kelsi’s mom, putting her at around forty-five years old, and had been taken under her and Dylan’s moms’ wings immediately.
They had quickly become the best of friends, and they still met every Sunday night for homemade tapas and cocktails.
Each week they made sure to try a new recipe, whether it be the food or the alcohol.
Kelsi had always looked up to the older woman and greatly admired the strong backbone she possessed.
Banksy waved at one of the chairs in front of the desk, saying, “Sit, please! We have so much to talk about.” She looked to Cat as Kelsi pulled out the chair on the left and sat down, crossing her right leg over her left and relaxing back into the chair.
“Cat, thank you for your help getting Kelsi in and showing her around a little bit. I’ll turn her back over to you after we’re done here. ”
Cat waved goodbye with a sly grin and shut the door behind her.
“Okay, Kelsi, tell me. How have you been holding up?”
Banksy gave her a sympathetic grin that almost made Kelsi choke up, caught off guard by the question.
“I’ve been better, but getting there,” was all she could manage to say. She’d rather not cry on her first day, and she internally begged Banksy to take the hint and move on.
Banksy nodded sympathetically and leaned across the desk to pat Kelsi’s hand. “You’ll be okay, sweetheart. This is a minor setback. Better things are on their way.”
Kelsi forced a wobbly smile and changed the subject. “So, what did you want to talk about?”
“Right, yes. Your work!” Banksy glanced at her watch and then the door, a small but genuine grin playing at her lips now.
“I’m actually waiting on someone else to join us before getting into the nitty-gritty of it, but I have a big case I want to assign to you and another new hire to handle.
But enough of that for now. I’m not going to say anything else until he arrives.
That case is going to eat up a lot of your time, so I’m going to try not to assign you too many additional cases that will require a lot of prep work.
Are you okay with tackling a larger share of the misdemeanor-appeals and probation-violation dockets? ”
Kelsi was torn. She was intrigued by this significant case Banksy was teasing and it seemed like it was a big deal for her to have it, but she couldn’t get rid of the sour taste in the back of her mouth at hearing she would be on the misdemeanor-appeals and probation-violation beats.
She had started with those dockets as a first-year attorney and worked her way up to bigger cases.
Going back to handling them had her feeling like she was being demoted.
But, even with her experience, she was still the new hire.
After a long pause, she finally choked out, “Yeah, that’s fine.”
Banksy saw straight through her, though, and said wryly, “It’s not a punishment, Kelsi, nor is it training wheels.
Normally all of the attorneys here rotate taking them, no matter how senior they are, unless we have a hire fresh out of law school who needs the experience.
Now, I’m giving you those dockets because they won’t take up too much of your time, and you’ll be able to focus on the case I’m assigning to you.
I would rather your attention not be split nor your work suffer because you’re stressed trying to juggle too many things. ”
Kelsi, properly chastised, nodded at Banksy.
“Of course. I understand.” She caught Banksy’s glance at her watch again and asked, “When are you expecting this other prosecutor to arrive?” Kelsi, not known for her patience, wondered if she could somehow convince Banksy to spill the beans on this big case early, if whomever she was waiting for was much later than expected.
“He should be here any second now.” Banksy looked like she was fighting a smile and could barely tear her eyes from the door to look at Kelsi when she answered.
“If you want to tell me anything about the case now, I don’t mind hearing the information twice.”
“No, we’ll wait—” Banksy was cut off by two sharp raps on the door. “Come in!”
The door opened, and Kelsi first saw a sleek man’s black dress shoe. She trailed her eyes up and over the man’s muscular thigh cloaked in black suit pants and what appeared to be a very broad chest. Then, finally, she met the most vibrant blue eyes—his blue eyes.