Queen Never Cry novel · Chapter 19 of 32

Chapter 19: The Box

The paralegal would not come upstairs.

She stood in the loft's stairwell with her coat buttoned to the neck and her hands wrapped around her elbows.

"The managing partner put him on leave this morning," she said. "She told me to pack his files for the Bar Association."

"And you made a second box."

"I made a second box." She swallowed. "I've worked for him nine years. I don't want to be the girl who watched."

She was gone before I could ask her name.

Garret lifted the lid on the steel table and moved his maps out of the way with one forearm.

The first sheet was a photocopy of a hospital clipboard.

PATIENT: ROARKE, POSY.

ARRIVAL: 1:40 A.M.

Under it, in my own handwriting, was my signature.

I had signed it with one hand while my daughter's whole body hitched against my other shoulder.

I traced my own name with a finger.

"Garret."

"I see it."

A yellow sticky note was pressed to the bottom corner of the page.

It was in the careful, slanted hand I had watched fill four months of margins.

Do not introduce. Per D.R. No exceptions.

Garret took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

"That's a lawyer writing down that he buried it because a client asked," he said slowly. "In his own hand."

"On my case."

"Pippa."

"I'm all right."

I was not all right.

I was a woman who had been given a floor.

I had not stood on solid ground in two years, and my knees did not know how.

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