Prologue
I’m sitting in traffic when I get the call.
Mel and I inch along the 101, just two miles from our Los Feliz exit, windows down to add a touch of pleasure to the forty-five minutes it’s taken to creep six miles.
Despite the notorious L.A. gridlock, our daily commute is a highlight for me. My roommate, Mel, a watercolorist, has a studio just three blocks from my arbitration office. So, we commute together, in the carpool lane (shaving exactly four minutes from our drive time), while tuning in to our Rush Hour Rhythms playlist.
I glance at Mel, who’s singing along to the SZA song pulsing from my car’s speakers. The mere sight of her—eyes closed, head tilted back, body mid-sway—brings me a rush of amused comfort. With her extreme bohemian vibe (less Coachella, more full-on eccentric nonconformist), people sometimes write her off at first glance. But Mel is absolutely brilliant; her artistic specialty is melding intricate landscapes with dynamic animal silhouettes. My favorite hangs in our living room—a lush green forest of evergreens on the left side of the canvas that seamlessly melts into the outline of a resplendent brown stallion by the time your eyes adjust to the right edge. That piece reminds me of summer rides at horse camp as a kid, thus my insistencethat we hang it prominently in our apartment. Despite her brilliance, Mel is still very much a starving artist, though we often refer to her as on the cusp of being “discovered.”
“What do you think it’ll be today?” Mel says, pointing to the digital roadway sign that’s still several yards ahead, straining to register the words. Usually there’s some clever pun that makes me smile.HANDS ON YOUR WHEEL, NOT YOUR MEALlast week. In the thick of summer, when the city held one collective scowl under triple-digit heat:THAT’S THE TEMPERATURE, NOT THE SPEED LIMIT.
“Maybe a Halloween pun?” I offer. “Something about ‘don’t become a ghost, wear your seat belt’?”
Mel snorts. It’s one of her many endearing qualities—that she actually snorts when she laughs. It’s this vibrating, piglike grunt that causes anyone in her vicinity to be instantly charmed. “That’s horrible,” she says when she’s calmed.
We inch closer, Mel squinting to see. As the passenger, she usually deciphers the script before I can. “ ‘Texting while driving, oh cell no,’ ” she reads with delight when the words come into view.
I huff a laugh. She snorts.
It’s funny, how something as negligible as a digital roadway sign pun can inject a microburst of happiness straight into my veins.
“I needed that,” I say, releasing a breath and twisting a bit of tension from my neck.
“Rough day?” Mel asks, though I know she’d rather do most anything else than discuss the details of my job.
Itwasa particularly challenging day at work. A mediation between CEO and CFO cofounders of a late-stage fintech start-up. They had been a husband-and-wife team but are now going through a spiteful divorce and disputing ownership of shares as the company prepares for its highly anticipated IPO. Things got especially ugly this afternoon, the two of them at each other’s throats, the line between business and personal so blurred it was difficult to keep negotiations on track.
“Hethinks he deserves the majority of shares because she spentmore time with her personal trainer than at work or with him.Shethinks she deserves more because he spent nearly sixty thousand company dollars last year on an executive coach, which was really just a way for him to receive ‘free therapy that didn’t work,’ ” I recap.
“Yikes,” Mel says, her standard response to any details of the mediations I handle at work. Anytime I regale her with stories from my day, it serves as a stark reminder to us both that she has positioned herself as far away from the corporate world as possible.
The truth is the whole situation today left me profoundly uneasy.
It’s not the first time there have been heated arguments in my office; as a corporate mediator, it’s to be expected. But this was the first time I’ve had to navigate the dissolution of both a business relationshipanda marriage.
The scene today made me think of my parents, of the anxiety that still bubbles in me at the mere recall of their once marriage. It takes a lot to get me back to that place, but thinking of it all now causes a quake of unease at my core. I angle my head out the window to breathe in something fresh.
“At least it’s Friday,” Mel reminds me. She and I have big plans for the weekend. We’ve stocked the apartment with our favorite snacks—white cheddar Popchips, peanut butter pretzel bites, and two bags of those frozen chocolate-covered strawberries from Costco that I think about far too often. We plan to spend the entire weekend on the couch (save for the two hours on Saturday afternoon when Mel is teaching a watercolor class at the senior center up the road), rewatching as many seasons as possible of our favorite reality show before the start of what the media has dubbed the “Trial of the Malibu Menace.”
When Margot Kitsch, an OG cast member of the hit reality showAuthentic Moms of Malibu, was arrested for the murder of her husband, Joe, there was an immediate, unrelenting firestorm of public attention. It’s to be expected, as Margot Kitsch is undeniably the most famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) of all the Authentic Moms.
The trial is set to start a week from Monday.
Just as I’m daydreaming about being nestled on my couch besideMel, a frozen chocolate-covered strawberry thawing in my mouth with season one ofAMOMstreaming, my phone rings.
Mel promptly lifts my phone from the cupholder between us, rakes her eyes over the screen, and then turns it to me. “Do you think it’s them?”
I nod, anticipation tightening my sternum. I purposely memorized the number—thisnumber—so I would not overlook the call I’ve been hoping for over the last several days.
“Syd! Answer it!” Mel demands, turning down the volume on the ominous Billie Eilish song now playing.
I take the phone from Mel and, still at a complete stop in traffic, answer on speaker. Mel and I stare at each other as the prerecorded message plays: “You have been selected... high-profile trial... jury sequestration... email with instructions...”
The high-pitched squeal Mel releases causes the driver beside me (his windows also down) to look over, irritated. I give him an apologetic wave/shrug combo and then hang up when the recording has ended.
Even through jury selection earlier this week, even as others were dismissed and I remained, I thought it a long shot.
“I’ve never been as thrilled to be your friend as I am in this moment,” Mel says, squeezing me to her as tightly as the confines of the car will allow.
