Family Law, Gin Phillips [top novels of all time .txt] 📗

mustache and meticulous handwriting. He’d been a police sergeant when they first met during an assault case years ago, but he’d been promoted to lieutenant this past spring.

She turned toward the door, wood bits crunching under her sandals. She checked her watch and hoped that Chris was at the station. She likely had his direct number at her office, but she’d just call the front desk—

“You getting a broom?” asked Evan as she brushed past him.

She nodded. Yes, a broom would be good. She’d get one after she called the police station. But first she would check on Rachel—the officers hadn’t asked the girl a single question, so there’d been absolutely no reason for her to wait around this long. If she still couldn’t convince Rachel to accept a ride home, Lucia would at least walk her to her car. And then she’d call Chris Sanderson, who had always exuded competence. No whining or excuses—he just did what needed to be done, and she’d always appreciated that.

II.

She couldn’t sleep. At 1:00 a.m. she was pulling the Yellow Pages out of the drawer, turning to W for “windows,” then switching to the Gs for “glass.” Glass repair? Or would that only involve windshields? She smoothed down the pages, centering the phone book on the counter. She’d leave it open, and that would be one less thing for the morning. She’d at least caught Chris Sanderson at his desk, and he’d promised to keep the incident out of the papers.

On the couch, Moxie snored, back legs twitching.

Lucia jerked at a quick, dark movement just inside the sliding doors, expecting a roach. It was only the shadow of her arm, stretching.

She had kept out of the sunroom for as long as she could. Now she gave in to its pull, swatting at the overhead light switch. The duct tape and tarp had been more successful than she’d expected: although the tarp rippled slightly with the breeze, the tape held firm. The effect was to make the room seem not so much damaged as under construction. Neither sweeping nor vacuuming had gotten rid of all the glass on the carpet and sofa. When she ran a hand over the cushions, invisible shards pricked her palm. She backed away, pressing herself against the wall, not so far from bullet hole number one, which had been stripped of its actual bullet.

A little plaster would fix the holes. And she’d need to repot the chin cactus, which was dented, but all in all, the room did not look like near murder.

She heard footsteps.

“Lucia,” said Evan, the floor creaking under him as he came toward her. His boxer shorts were off-kilter, rucked around the crotch.

“I’m going to call someone about the window first thing in the morning,” she said.

“Lucia.”

He leaned against the wall next to her. She slanted into him.

“You really have no clue?” he said.

She shook her head.

His hand skimmed up her leg, then slid under her T-shirt. “I love this thigh. It’s the most perfect thigh in the universe. Your right thigh, I mean. The left one—it’s adequate, I suppose.”

Even now, he could make her laugh.

“We do have to actually talk about it,” he said.

“I don’t know what to say. I don’t have an answer.”

“I’m not looking for an answer.”

“What are you looking for?”

She saw Rachel’s hair, frizzing at the neck, copper curls. A spill of dirt, gray and dry, the chin cactus round and red like her mother’s ancient pin cushion. The groove of Rachel’s button carved into her arm, dog hair like a tumbleweed. The dry skin of Evan’s naked knee.

“Thoughts,” he said. “Any thoughts at all.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

“It doesn’t have to be right now,” he said, and God, she loved this man.

The tarp rattled like paper, the sound of someone searching for the right page.

“I know I have this ability,” she said. “To, you know, close the door when something is too hard. To block it out.”

His fingers curled around hers. “I had no idea.”

They stayed against the wall for several quiet minutes, and then he asked her if she’d like him to make coffee and keep her company. She told him to get some sleep, and eventually he disappeared through the doorway and she was left alone with the tarp and other things.

She had nearly forgotten the feel of 3:00 a.m., how the streets and the skies and even the insects were silent, how your arms were heavier and your head was thick. During law school and the first years of her career, she’d been well acquainted with this syrupy time of night. One year at Legal Aid. Two years in the district attorney’s office, first with family court and then with juvenile court. She hadn’t lasted long. She—pretty little blonde—would lie in bed and discover that some child had burrowed into her brain, maybe Bequeatha Long with her doll’s face and swollen eye. Maybe Alicia Redmont, who shot her father after he kicked her pregnant mother in the stomach, or maybe Jed Louis, who robbed a man at gunpoint but still slept with a Winnie-the-Pooh bear in tenth grade—and how was she supposed to have known those sorts of stories existed? She would sit at this same dining-room table and think of how she might make a difference—such simple, stupid, nursery-rhyme morality, a near impossibility with the children, who—before she ever met them—had been broken into so many pieces that neither she nor all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could have put them back together again. She’d tried. She’d listened. She’d remembered the names of their sisters and mothers and best friends, and she’d carefully explained their options, and she’d always shown up when she said she would. She’d played a silent game as she walked through the county jail—Who would kill me? And she’d look at face after face and think, He would. He would. Maybe not him. And sometimes then and sometimes now she cringed at herself, wondering if