All Chapters of SECOND VERDICT: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Present Day – SaturdayEmma's phone died at 11 PM Friday night.Not the battery. She'd turned it off. Held the button down until the screen went dark and the buzzing stopped and the apartment went quiet enough that she could hear the refrigerator sound and the distant sound of traffic six floors below and her own breathing, which was shakier than she wanted it to be.She'd read enough of the messages to know what was being said.Sleeping her way to the top.Always knew she didn't earn Bennett on merit.Richardson's little pet.She should be ashamed.That last one had come from an internal Morrison email address. Not anonymous. Someone with their name attached, who'd decided their opinion of Emma Parker's character was worth putting in writing on a Friday night.She didn't recognize the name. That was somehow the worst part. Not someone she'd wronged or competed with or even spoken to. Just a person in the building who'd seen a ten-second video and decided they knew everything about her

Present Day – Monday MorningCourtroom 4B smelled like old wood and central heating, it has AV technology, and some feature advanced evidence presentation systems.Emma had been in courtrooms before. Had sat second chair on two civil cases, had argued motions, had stood at a podium and felt the specific weight of a judge's attention. She knew what this felt like. The formality of it. The way the room is organized; gallery, bar, bench into a hierarchy that made everyone's role unmistakably clear.She had never walked into a courtroom knowing that half the people in the gallery had seen a video of her kissing opposing counsel.Not opposing counsel. Her own co-counsel.She corrected herself automatically. Kept her face neutral. Took her seat at the plaintiff's table and opened her trial binder and did not look at the gallery where the Bennett pharmaceutical executives sat behind her, or at the Genovex defense team already arranged at their table ten feet away, or at the journalists in th

Present Day – WednesdayThe Bennett files were gone.Emma had turned her office inside out. Every drawer, every folder, every stack on the credenza that she kept meaning to organize and never did. The George rebuttal notes, the ones with her handwritten annotations going back to last night's call, were not here. Not in the shared drive. Not in the courthouse conference room they'd used during the lunch recess.She stood in the middle of her office and thought back through the morning.Alex had been holding them during Martinez's redirect. Emma had watched her flip through the pages when George took the stand. And then the afternoon session had started and everything moved fast and somewhere between Hale's examination and Judge Reyes calling an early recess, the notes had ended up in Alex's trial bag instead of Emma's.She checked her watch. The recess was until tomorrow morning. The notes weren't critical tonight but she'd built her entire cross-examination preparation around those ann

Present Day – Saturday MorningThe call came at eight forty-seven in the morning.Emma was on her second coffee, still in the oversized law school sweatshirt she'd slept in, Justice sprawled across her feet, when her phone lit up with the paralegal coordinator's number.She picked up before the second ring."The jury's back," the coordinator said.She made it to the courthouse in twenty-two minutes.Alex was already in the corridor outside Courtroom 4B when Emma came through the security doors, still buttoning her coat, hair not quite as composed as it usually was. She had clearly also received the call and also run.They looked at each other."Ready?" Alex said.Emma thought about three weeks of preparation. About Martinez and George and the forty million dollar gap in a royalty model. About closing arguments and jury questions and the specific held-breath quality of the last eighteen hours."Yes," she said.They went in.---The courtroom had a different quality this morning. Fuller,

Present Day – Monday MorningSanta Barbara had been warm and blue and entirely removed from the rest of Emma's life.She had not checked her work email once. Had not thought about Morrison or the firm or anything with a docket number. Had spent seven days in a hotel room above the Pacific with Alex Richardson and room service and the luxury of waking up slowly to lovemaking that causes her heart to skip every time she remembers it, with nowhere to be, and she was not ready for it to be over.But the highway back to San Francisco did not care what she was ready for.They drove back Sunday evening. Alex drove again, the same easy focus as the week before, but the direction was wrong now and Emma felt it in her chest the whole way up the coast. The city appeared on the horizon as the sun went down behind them, the skyline familiar and slightly ominous in the way that all familiar things become when you have been away long enough to remember you have a life inside them."You're quiet," Ale