Kaela Blanc knows better than to get her hopes up.
She's spent years learning that a little attention doesn't necessarily mean anything. A smile is just a smile. Flirting is harmless. And some fantasies are better left exactly where they belong.
In her imagination.
Besides, she's a grown woman with a career, a mortgage, and absolutely no business getting herself tangled up in something she doesn't understand.
But then there's a look she can't quite forget.
A conversation she keeps replaying.
And three men who are becoming increasingly difficult to get out of her head.
Kaela knows she should be careful.
After all, wanting something has never guaranteed she'd get to have it.
But what if the one thing she's afraid to want is the very thing she never saw coming?
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The Danilov opposition was due to be e-filed with the court in eleven minutes, and Katalina Brooks was in the bathroom redoing her lipstick.
I knew this because I'd watched her walk past my office four minutes ago with her compact already open, and because I'd been staring at her half-finished response brief for the last hour like it owed me money. It didn't owe me money. It owed the Danilov family an actual argument, and what it had instead was a paragraph that started "Defendant respectfully submits" and then, as far as I could tell, gave up.
I pulled the file back onto my screen and read the relevant clause from the settlement agreement for the fourth time. Employee shall be compensated for all accrued but unused paid time off upon separation, regardless of the manner of separation. Simple. Clean. The kind of sentence that didn't need Katalina's signature block to mean something — it needed someone to actually cite it.
I cited it. I built the argument underneath it, the one Katalina's draft had walked right past — that "regardless of the manner of separation" wasn't boilerplate, it was the whole ballgame, because our client's former employer had moved for partial summary judgment, trying to claw back Mrs. Danilov's PTO payout on a technicality about how her termination had been characterized in an internal memo nobody outside the building was ever supposed to see. I found the memo. I cited the memo. I finished the opposition brief with six minutes to spare and sent it to the printer instead of queuing it to e-file myself, because it was still, technically, going out under Katalina's signature block, and Katalina liked to at least hold the pages before they left the building.
She came back smelling like the good lipstick, the one she kept in her desk and not her bag, and picked the pages up off the printer without looking at me.
"You really didn't need to touch it," she said, already skimming. "I had a structure."
"You had a topic sentence." I said it lightly, because I'd learned a long time ago that lightly was the only register Katalina could hear anything in. "I just gave it some friends."
She read for another few seconds, and I watched the exact moment she got to the memo citation, because her mouth did a small, involuntary thing, somewhere between impressed and annoyed, like she'd bitten into something that was better than she wanted it to be.
"Fine," she said. "This is fine." She squared the pages against the desk with more force than paper needed. "I'm putting my initials on the memo research, though. I found that document weeks ago."
She had not found that document. I had found that document at eleven-forty last night, sitting cross-legged on my couch with a bag of pretzels and the Danilov file open on my firm laptop, because I couldn't stop turning the case over even after I'd clocked out, which was either the best or the worst thing about me depending on which performance review you asked.
"Sure," I said. "Your initials."
It cost me nothing to say. It cost me nothing to say most days. I'd gotten good at handing Katalina the easy version of things, my work, my patience, occasionally my lunch hour, the way you get good at anything you do enough times without anyone stopping you. And most days that was fine, because most days I liked the work more than I minded the woman, and there was something almost peaceful in doing a thing well and letting someone else take the credit for it.
Most days.
She swept out with the brief, already texting someone with her free hand. A few minutes later, the court's e-filing system sent its confirmation to my inbox: opposition to the motion for partial summary judgment, filed with the Clerk of the Superior Court, timestamped six minutes before the deadline, Katalina's name on the signature line and mine nowhere on the page. I sat there a second longer than I needed to, tired in the specific, familiar way that had nothing to do with the hour and everything to do with whose name had just gone out under that timestamp.
My real job, the one nobody put on an org chart, was making Katalina Brooks look competent to the people who mattered, while quietly building a record that would make it obvious, eventually, to somebody who mattered more, that I could do this without her. Not files. I wasn't about to copy client work onto a personal laptop, no matter how badly some nights I wanted the receipts. Just a running list, dates and a one-line note on what I'd actually contributed, nothing that named a client or meant anything to anyone without firm access, kept in a notes app nobody but me ever opened. Enough to say, when the day came, here's proof of the work, ask to see the actual drafts yourself.
I still thought, sometimes, about a message that had gone to my email by mistake instead of Katalina's — a client on the Ortiz matter, thanking "the attorney who actually called me back." I hadn't saved it anywhere. I still remembered the exact wording, word for word, which was more than I could say for half the case law I'd actually had to memorize.
And there was an idea I hadn't said out loud to anyone yet, not even Ty: I didn't necessarily want to make partner at Brooks. I wanted to argue a motion in my own name and first-chair a case from open to close, and then decide, from there, whether this firm — built by a man I liked, staffed by a cousin I didn't, and increasingly run by a man I'd never met but heard entirely too much about — was actually where I wanted the rest of my career to live.
Vincenzo Brooks I'd met exactly twice, both times pleasant, both times brief, both times ending with him telling me some version of keep doing what you're doing. His son I had never met at all. I didn't even know his first name, only that he existed, somewhere upstairs, running more of the firm every year, despite two years of anonymous memos from "M.B." landing in my review file with notes so precise they read like someone had actually read my work instead of skimmed it. Half the associates thought M.B. was a committee. I privately suspected M.B. was one very thorough, very silent man, and I found that more interesting than I probably should have.
I ate lunch at my desk, a sandwich I'd made that morning while half-asleep, good bread wasted on a brain that hadn't caught up to my hands yet, and read four pages of the book I kept in my bag for exactly this purpose. The cover had a shirtless man on a boat and the actual content was ninety percent banter and ten percent a plot about a Scottish laird who did not, historically, need to be shirtless nearly that often, and I loved it without reservation. Ty called these books my "structural integrity." He meant it as a joke and he was also completely right. There was something about knowing, a hundred pages in, that everyone was going to get exactly what they deserved — that the laird was going to fall stupid in love with a woman the town had underestimated, and that this was allowed to just happen to her without her earning it through suffering first — that got me through days like this one.
A firm-wide email landed while I was reading — a reminder to schedule new headshots before the website refresh, everyone please respond by Friday — and I felt the old, small flicker before I could stop it, a fast calculation about angles and which blazer hid the most, gone again almost as soon as it came. I closed the email without answering it and shifted in my chair instead, tucking one leg up under me the way I always did when I wanted to feel settled.
I didn't need it to happen to me. I'd made my peace with that a long time ago, the same practical, dry-eyed peace you make with the fact that you're never going to be six inches taller or independently wealthy. I liked men. Men, historically, liked the idea of me right up until they had to be seen with it.
There had been a boy, once, a lifetime ago. Not now. That memory had a door and the door stayed shut on workdays; I'd learned that much about myself. I finished my sandwich instead and pulled up the Whitfield discovery responses, because those weren't going to draft themselves, and it wasn't going to be the woman currently three doors down showing Vincenzo's newest paralegal "how things really work here," angling for a mention in his next partners' memo.
Bridgette buzzed my desk a little after three. "Front desk. Got a doctor on the line, says he was told to ask for whoever handled the Danilov thing — a PTO dispute for one of his former residents. I told him that was you. He's asking if anyone has twenty minutes today."
"Today, today?"
"Your three-thirty got pushed to tomorrow. I can put him in that slot at four, if you want it."
I wanted it. I told her to send him back at four, then spent ten minutes I didn't really have pulling up his hospital bio, because a name and twenty minutes wasn't much to go on. Dr. Jack Riley. OB/GYN, one year into a maternal-fetal medicine fellowship — high-risk pregnancy, mostly. A short list of published research sat under his bio, something about complications in preterm labor. The photo was the standard stiff head-and-shoulders, but even stiff and badly lit he had the kind of face that looked like it was in the middle of deciding whether to smile at you — hazel eyes, a little furrow of concentration between his brows, like the photographer had asked him a hard question right before the shutter went.
He was five minutes early. Bridgette walked him back herself, which she didn't do for everyone, and he stood when I came around my desk instead of staying seated the way most people did, hand already out.
"Kaela Blanc. Bridgette says you're the one who can actually help."
"I can tell you if I can help, which is a different sentence, but sit." I gestured him into the chair across from mine. "Bridgette said this was about a former resident of yours."
"I supervised Priya during her first year." He laughed, easy and unguarded, nothing like the careful stillness of the photo I'd pulled up ten minutes ago. "She resigned during an HR investigation that ended up clearing her completely, and now they're trying to claw back her accrued leave because of how they wrote up the separation. She showed me the letter because I was the person she trusted to look at it first, and she asked me to see if it was worth taking to someone before she had to explain the whole thing to a stranger."
"So this is her letter, and she gave you permission to bring it to me."
"Right. I don't have her personnel file — that's hers, not mine, and I told her I wouldn't go around her on that." He slid a single printed page across the desk, not a folder. "Just the letter. She wanted an honest read before she put herself through more of this."
I read it twice. It was worse than the Danilov version — sloppier, a hospital HR department trying to do at speed what a law firm should have slowed down to get right — and by the time I finished I had four separate holes in their reasoning lined up and wanted, unprofessionally, to be the one who got to open every single one of them in front of whoever wrote it.
"This is fixable," I said, "and I think I can help her. But I can't do anything with it beyond this conversation — I'd need to hear from Priya directly, and I'd need her signature before anyone at that hospital sends me a personnel file. That part isn't optional."
"That's exactly what I told her you'd say." He let out a breath, shoulders dropping an inch. "She's terrified of the whole process. I think hearing that upfront will actually help."
"Good. Have her call and ask for me directly." I slid one of my cards across the desk. "Tell her to bring the letter and nothing else, and we'll go from there."
"Thank you," he said, standing, the letter folded back into his jacket. "Genuinely. I know it's probably a mess."
"It's a fixable mess. Have her call."
He was gone by four-twenty. Bridgette noted the referral in the intake system with nothing open behind it — no matter, no client, just Priya's name and a callback expected — and I sat there a second longer than I needed to before I made myself finish the Whitfield responses, because Katalina was not going to write them, and somebody in this building had actually earned the right to be tired by six o'clock.
By five-forty the floor had thinned out to the people who billed too much to leave early and the people, like me, who didn't have anywhere better to be. I was still working through the Whitfield responses, half my attention already gone for the day, when my phone buzzed. Ty.
Sis. Emergency. Zeke says the guy on my dating app "collects knives" as a hobby and I need you to tell me if that's a red flag or if I'm being a coward.
It's a red flag, Ty.
OKAY BUT HOW MANY KNIVES.
I laughed out loud, alone, at my desk, which was not a thing I usually did at work, and typed back something about acceptable knife thresholds that made him send four separate voice memos of himself losing his mind, which I listened to on my drive home with the windows down and the last of the heat still radiating up off the asphalt the way it did every evening in Phoenix from about April through October, a heat that had personality, that leaned on you like a friend who didn't understand boundaries.
My house sat on a quiet street in a suburb far enough from downtown that the drive gave the radio time to finish a whole song. A clean three-bedroom starter home, move-in ready when I bought it two years ago, a down payment that had taken longer to save than I liked to admit out loud. I hadn't done much to it beyond making it mine: a deep, stubborn yellow on the kitchen walls that I'd talked myself into one Saturday and never regretted, and a bookshelf running floor to ceiling in the living room, organized by nothing anyone else would recognize as a system — paperbacks with cracked spines from being read four times leaning against ones I hadn't touched yet, a shelf of just the Scottish-laird kind that I didn't apologize for and didn't explain to guests, because there weren't many guests to explain it to. My grandmother's afghan, the one worn, out-of-place thing in an otherwise ordinary house, lived over the back of the couch year-round even though it was ninety degrees outside more months than not, because some things earned their spot by comfort alone.
I dropped my bag by the door, kicked my shoes off toward the pile that was technically a shoe rack, and stood in my kitchen eating crackers straight out of the box while I decided whether tonight was a real-dinner night or a cereal night. It ended up being real food — pasta, garlic, more butter than any nutritionist would sanction — because I'd had a decent day despite Katalina, and a decent day deserved a dinner that took more than four minutes.
I ate on the couch with the afghan over my legs and read forty more pages of the Scottish laird falling in love with a woman who hadn't done a single thing to deserve being underestimated, and thought, once, briefly, about a doctor who'd slid a single letter across my desk instead of a whole file he didn't have permission to bring.
Four holes in a bad HR letter, and a new matter I actually wanted to open.llment here to see it in the Lantern reader.
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