Dumped My Ex, Married the Mafia Don novel · Chapter 29 of 32

Chapter 29: The Steps

I bought the suit myself.

Charcoal grey, from a shop downtown, with what was left of the fifty thousand.

At nine fifty on the second Monday of November I stood in the fourth-floor hallway of the courthouse in it.

Sixty new lawyers were lined up along the wall with their families. Grandmothers. Babies. Somebody's dog in a bow tie that security had somehow allowed.

My family took up a whole bench and half the hallway.

Tito wore the navy suit with a new tie, orange, that he'd chosen himself.

Paola had a camera. The aunt in purple had a corsage for me that nobody had asked for.

Fiorella sat at the end of the bench with her glasses on their chain, watching the door across the hall.

The door to Hearing Room B.

At nine fifty-five it opened.

Two officers came out first.

Whitman came out between them.

Orange jumpsuit. White canvas shoes. His wrists cuffed in front of him.

The hallway went quiet one family at a time.

Behind him came a woman from the disciplinary board with a file under her arm.

"Disbarred," she said to the officer, not quietly. "Effective today."

Whitman heard it.

He looked up and saw me.

He saw the suit, and the sixty new lawyers lined up along the wall, and the sign on the courtroom door. ADMISSIONS CEREMONY, 10 A.M.

His face did something I'd never seen it do.

It gave up.

"Jo," he said.

I didn't answer.

Tito stepped in front of me.

He stood very straight in his navy suit and looked up at the man who'd put him in a car.

"Her name," he said, "is Josephine."

The officers walked Whitman down the hall to the elevator.

Nobody moved out of his way. He had to go around the dog.

At the far end of the hall, on a bench by herself, sat his mother.

She had a tissue in her hand.

She watched him go into the elevator, and then she looked down the hall at all of us.

Nobody was sitting with her.

I didn't go to her.

I didn't laugh, either.

At ten o'clock the courtroom doors opened.

I raised my right hand with fifty-nine strangers and swore to support the Constitution and to conduct myself with all good fidelity.

My voice didn't shake once.

Afterward we lined up to sign the roll, a big leather book on a table at the front.

I wrote my name.

Josephine Whitsett.

Nobody counted pills into my palm first.

Nobody held the pen.

When I came out onto the courthouse steps, it was cold and bright, and the whole family was waiting at the bottom.

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