Chapter Six

I don't tell any of this to my new associate, Priya Mehta, when she comes into my office at ten in the morning with a fresh copy of the Mercer case filings.

Priya is twenty-six, sharp as a blade, and deeply nosy in the way that makes her excellent at her job. She sets the files on my desk and looks at me with bright eyes.

"I looked up Harrington Legal," she says. "They're serious. Like, really serious. And the lead—"

"I know who the lead is," I say.

She pauses. Looks at me differently. "Oh." A beat. "Oh, he's the—"

"Priya."

"Right. Files. Got it." She sits down across from me and opens her notepad.

I look down at the documents.

Mercer Tech versus Harrington Holdings.

My client versus his family's company.

And somewhere in the fine print of the filings, listed under opposing counsel: E. Harrington, Esquire.

He became a lawyer too. I didn't know that. I didn't let myself look.

I wonder if he knew about me. If he saw my name on the filing and felt the same cold thing move through his chest that moved through mine this morning.

I wonder if he's ready.

Because I am.

Or at least, that's what I'm going to keep telling myself.

I walk to the window of my office and look down to the streets of New York and something in me feel so proud of how far I have come the last six years and I couldn't help but recall the very day I decided not to fall apart.

It was four weeks after the divorce was finalized. I was twenty-four years old and living in a studio apartment in Queens that I could barely afford. I had left the Brooklyn apartment, I couldn't stay there. Too many mornings. Too much of him in the light coming through those windows.

The studio was small. A bed, a kitchenette, a window that looked out at a brick wall. I had a box of law books on the floor because I had no shelf, and a mattress on the floor because I hadn't bought a frame yet. I had been eating cereal for most of a week because I couldn't make myself cook.

Jade showed up that Saturday morning without calling first. She had two bags of groceries and her overnight bag, and she walked in, looked around at the state of things, and did not say a word about it. She just went to the kitchen and started cooking.

I sat on my mattress and watched her.

After a while she brought me a plate of eggs and sausages, and sat beside me.

"You're allowed to be sad," she said.

"I know."

"But not forever."

I pushed the eggs around the plate. "It hurts," I breathed. And I had not said that out loud to anyone. Not my mom, not Jade, not anyone.

Because saying it out loud made it real and I had been so careful to keep it from being real.

"I know it does," Jade said. She put her arm around my shoulders. "But Maya. You are not the girl who quits. You never have been."

I thought about that. I thought about the girl who had arrived at NYU with two suitcases and no safety net. The girl who worked two jobs and still got straight A's. The girl who had come from nothing and made something of it every single time.

I put a forkful of eggs in my mouth.

It was the first real thing I had eaten in days.

"Okay," I muttered.

"Okay?"

"I'm going to finish law school," I said. "And I'm going to be the best in my class. And I'm going to have a career that means something."

"Yeah you are!" Jade cheered.

"And I'm never going to let anyone make me feel like I don't belong in a room again."

She looked at me for a moment. Then she squeezed my shoulder tight. "There she is."

I graduated at the top of my law school class two years later.

My mom screamed when they called my name. She was sitting in the third row with Jade and she actually stood up and screamed and then put her hand over her mouth and sat back down. I saw it from the stage. I held my diploma and I smiled so wide my face hurt.

After the ceremony, my mom hugged me for a long time.

"I always knew," she whispered. "From the day you were born, I always knew you were going to do something that mattered.

My mother had raised me alone since I was six years old. She had worked as a home health aide for twenty-two years, long shifts, worn shoes, a woman who never complained about what she didn't have. She had given me everything she could, and then she had trusted me to find the rest.

I would never stop trying to be worthy of that.

I got a job at Caldwell & Associates straight out of law school. Junior associate, entry level, the kind of role where you run the copies and draft the bottom sections of briefs. But it was good.

I was focused in a way that I think only people who have had their world collapse under them can be. I had nothing to lose and everything to prove, and that combination is a dangerous and useful thing.