Sarah POV
Superior Family Court, Manhattan
The courtroom didn’t just smell old, it was practically marinated in stale arguments and dust. So much for those grand, marble palaces you see on TV.
This one?
More like a grandma’s closet stuffed with forgotten junk. Every throat clear and chair squeak bounced around like a nervous squirrel. You could feel the pressure, like the whole place was one sigh away from popping.
Alessandro squeezed my hand, looked all cool on the outside, but, trust me, his pulse was doing backflips. His thumb continued to draw these slow, random circles, like, was he attempting to signal “relax, we’ve got this” in Morse code or something?
In the meantime, I was hanging on so tightly that my fingers might have been turning blue, as if I had been thrown into the deep end armed only with a partially inflated float
And then, ugh, Adrian. Sitting there, right across from us, practically dripping with smugness.
Honestly, he looked like the sort of someone who’d actually
