Chapter 3

When I pushed open the door to my mother's law office, she was behind her desk, going through a case file.

She looked up, and her eyes landed on the gauze over my cheekbone. They stayed there for a couple of seconds.

"He hit you?"

"Yeah."

She seemed to want to say something, but after all these years apart we'd grown stiff with each other, and she looked a little at a loss.

The silence stretched a few minutes before she spoke.

"Your father took up with another woman the second year we were married."

"I was seven months pregnant. One night I got a call. That woman, her belly bigger than mine, telling me to step aside."

She said it calmly, the way she'd recite the facts of someone else's case.

"I went to him. He told me I was too domineering, that he couldn't breathe living with me. That she was gentler. That she needed him."

She let out a soft breath. "I had the baby. The moment I was out of confinement, I filed the papers. He knelt in front of me and cried. Said he'd change. Said he'd be good to me and the baby for the rest of his life."

She paused and glanced at me.

"I believed him. And he fooled me twice more with the exact same words. The third time I didn't say anything. I just went straight to court and got the divorce."

"So listen to me, Deidre. There's no shame in falling for a man's sweet talk for a while."

"What's frightening is when you can't get out. You need to learn to treat your emotions as a tool, not let them lead you around."

She let go of whatever she'd been holding onto, stepped back, sat down behind her desk, opened the file, as if none of what she'd just said had come from her.

"Send the evidence to my email. I'll handle the rest."

I sat in that office the whole afternoon. My mother took two calls and met with a couple who'd come in for a consultation.

The wife was crying too hard to speak. My mother handed her tissues, waited until she was done, then laid out the pros and cons plainly, one by one.

Not one word of extra comfort the entire time, and yet when the woman left she held my mother's hand, unable to put her gratitude into words.

I was starting to understand why so many people came to her.

When we wrapped up that evening, she slid a key across to me.

"That apartment on the west side of town is empty. Stay there for now. It's far from him. He won't find you."

I nodded and closed my hand around the key. She wasn't looking at me when she said it, head down as she packed away a file, but I knew it wasn't that she didn't care.

She just wasn't the type for the whole mother-and-daughter crying-in-each-other's-arms scene.

For the next few days I didn't go back. I spent my days sitting in her office, helping her sort materials for old cases.

When her assistant had too much on her plate, I pitched in, poured tea and water, did the printing and copying, took a call for her now and then.

Everyone here called her Ms. Henson, with a respect in their voices I'd never seen when I was a child.

She'd sit dead center in the conference room, and no matter how tough the person across from her was, in the end they'd bow their head and sign the settlement.

At night I sat in the apartment she'd set up for me. The cut on my face had scabbed over. It didn't hurt much anymore.

I heated myself a cup of milk and opened my phone to the messages my mother had sent, a few voice notes, all details about handling the evidence.

The last one was two seconds long. I tapped it. She said, "There's braised pork ribs in the fridge. Make some for yourself."

I sat there holding the phone for a while, and slowly let myself relax.