A Special Place for Women, Laura Hankin [brene brown rising strong .txt] 📗

through the file cabinet and Margot read some letters from the judge’s drawer, I became convinced that they’d been involved with Nicole.

I, meanwhile, wasn’t calm at all. My ears were alert to every creak, every sound. At any moment, the judge could come home. When he did, Margot and Vy would disappear in some puff of smoke, leaving me alone and guilty in his office.

“Do you need me to do anything?” I asked.

“Just get a sense of him, his life,” Margot said. “In case it helps your writing.” I looked at the diplomas the judge had displayed prominently on his walls, the framed portraits of himself draped in robes. He wasn’t attractive or unattractive, just bland, the kind of man you’d pass on the street without a second thought. But sometimes the blandest-looking ones were the worst of all.

“Bank statements,” Vy said, stepping back from the drawer and holding up a sheaf of paper. “There’s a charge at a women’s health clinic for the right amount, around the date that the woman told us it happened.”

“Perfect,” Margot said. “Jillian, unlock your phone?”

I did, hesitant, and Vy grabbed it from me, using it to take a picture of the evidence. Margot, meanwhile, held up the letters she’d been reading. “Notes too. From some prominent antichoice advocates, thanking him for coming to dinner and complimenting him on his golf game, making veiled allusions to what they hope he’ll do for them.” She too took pictures with my phone, until her own phone buzzed. “Oh, they’re leaving the restaurant.” She sighed. “I suppose we should go.”

Quickly, they put everything back in its place, as if we’d never been there at all. Then, right before we were about to leave the office, they exchanged a look. Margot stepped forward and picked up the bust of that scowling lawyer, moving him from the desk to the top of the file cabinet, a tiny act of mischief. “All right, then,” she said, and turned to the door.

“So go ahead and start writing,” Margot said to me, a hitch in her breath as we half ran back down the hallway, out the back door, and reentered the night air. She stopped moving for a brief moment and smiled at me. “And obviously we won’t tell anyone about this if you don’t.”

TWENTY-TWO

Okay, which do you think is more evocative?” I asked Raf as we stood in his kitchen chopping onions in the morning light, both of us sniffling from the juice. “‘He has no soul, like a cardboard cutout of a man,’ or ‘He’s pure appetite, like a sentient Hungry Hungry Hippo’?”

“Hmm,” he said, and paused in his chopping to consider, rolling the words around in his mind. “Hippo.”

Libby had told me I could stay as long as I wanted (“Seriously, I love company!” she’d insisted). And even tiny rat dog Bella had been growing on me. But it wasn’t a good idea to get too attached. So when Raf had gotten back into town the day before, I’d moved to his couch.

He had tried to give me the bed, saying that he’d be rattling around in the kitchen early anyway. He was working on a new recipe for his fricasé de pollo. (Of course he was. The glowing New Yorker review of his restaurant had gushed over everything else and then called his fricasé “simple and homey, if not particularly complex.” That had probably been driving Raf nuts.) I’d refused his offer. I wasn’t going to inconvenience him even more than I already was. Besides, it wasn’t like Raf’s old couch was going to ruin a blissful night of slumber—I hadn’t been able to sleep well for weeks now, and my entrance into the world of crime a couple nights ago hadn’t helped. At random flashes, I was back there, standing in the judge’s office, waiting for my consequences.

Raf had refused my refusal. After a ten-minute standoff during which we’d repeated each other’s names in increasingly firm tones while he carried my bag to the bedroom and I wrestled it back to the living room, he’d finally relented.

“Ha, I win!” I’d said, parking myself on the couch.

“Or I do,” he’d replied, his eyes crinkling, and let out his signature Raf cackle, a belly laugh that seemed all the heartier coming from his beanpole frame.

That morning, I’d woken up early, going through the document photos we’d taken the other night, the notes from the stories that Margot had told me. The more I learned about the judge, the more incensed I became. This wasn’t a Nicole Woo-Martin situation. This man deserved what was coming to him.

Raf had come out of the bedroom in a T-shirt and old running shorts, rubbing his eyes. “Trade help for help?” I’d asked.

“Oh. Uh, yeah, sure,” Raf had said. Then he’d made us both some strong cups of coffee and, with him unshaven and my hair unbrushed, we’d gotten to work.

“I can’t get the flavors quite right,” he’d said, throwing an onion at me. I caught it with one hand. “Hey, look at those reflexes!”

“That’s it, I’m giving up writing for sports. Don’t try to change my mind.”

He laughed and we started chopping, our shoulders almost touching thanks to his limited counter space. He cut his entire onion in the time it took me to slice a quarter of mine. We moved on to other ingredients. He handed me some firm, plump tomatoes to dice, then poured oil into a saucepan on the stove. It was all a little thrilling, cooking like this, since my typical mealtime routine had recently consisted of shoving fistfuls of cereal in my mouth, or when I wanted to get really fancy, heating up some frozen Indian food from Trader Joe’s. Now, as I explained what Margot had told me about the judge (though I left out the part about breaking and entering), Raf sautéed the onions, their pungent smell making my stomach rumble, and