Her Wedding Dress novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Daylight

The lawyer saw me at nine the next morning, before her first client.

She was past sixty, with cropped gray hair and reading glasses on a chain, and she did not tell me she was sorry for my trouble.

She read Clifton's petition standing up.

"Abandonment," she said. "You were abandoned. He gave your wedding to another woman in front of three hundred people."

"Two hundred and eighty. I knew the seating chart."

"Good. Keep that precision." She dropped the pages on her desk. "He named his brother because he wants a judge to see a cheating wife and a mother who can't be trusted with a baby. It's lazy. What do you have?"

I put my phone on her blotter and pressed play.

She listened to ten minutes of my family and Judith in the room with her eyes shut and her pen still.

When she opened them, she looked ten years younger and very hungry.

"You'll counter-file this week," she said. "The paper they put in front of you is an exhibit. He signed it before the wedding, which means he planned to end your marriage and take the child on the day he stood next to you."

"Is that enough?"

"It's a start. The rest is what you do in public." She took off her glasses. "Dr. Ashdown. Is he a problem?"

I thought about a car console, a gearshift against my hip, and a sound he hadn't planned to make.

"No," I said.

"Then let him be your friend in daylight, where people can see it. Nothing in a dark car."

I felt my face go hot, and she smiled for the first time.

My phone buzzed in the elevator.

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