“Excuse me one moment,” I said and stood up.
“Oh, I’ll be waiting right here!”
I forced a smile and left the meeting room. Missy’s file wasn’t on the desk in my office and there was no sign of the intern, so I had to go and pull the file from the records room myself. As I made my way back to the room, I stopped to brush dog hair off the front of my pants. It was a never-ending battle, even though I didn’t own a dog. My boss did, and he brought it into work regularly. The thing shed enough hair that I could have built myself an entire new dog out of the tufts of fur that gathered in the corners.
“Work in a small office, they said. It’s an experience, they said,” I muttered under my breath.
To a certain extent, that was right. Hopewell was a small city and Fisher Law was a small firm, so we dealt with both civil and criminal cases. In a big firm, you’d never work on contract law one day and a bail hearing the next. I loved the variety of the work. I just hated the small-town drama that came with it. We were a law firm, not the local diner, but a day didn’t go by that someone didn’t drop in just to “catch up.” Why the hell I needed to see pictures of Mrs. Alderson’s new grandbabies, I still hadn’t figured out. But my boss assured me it was all part of the job, so I smiled and made the right noises and definitely didn’t tell her that they looked like little bald aliens.
I left that for the intern and he didn’t disappoint.
Still, Mrs. Alderson had only laughed and said, “Oh, aren’t you a hoot?”
A fucking nightmare, more like, I thought as I dug through the filing cabinets. I finally found Missy’s file under M, because of course I did. My boss had assured me that the intern was smart as a whip, but I had serious doubts. The guy turned up at the office in sneakers, for crying out loud.
I ducked back into the meeting room and took my seat, pretending not to notice that the top two buttons on Missy’s blouse were now undone. I opened the file and said, “So to refresh, we’re going for a no-fault divorce, correct?”
Missy cleared her throat and pulled an iPad out of her bag and slid it across the table with a manicured fingertip. “Actually, I have something to show you that might change that.”
“Oh?”
Missy nodded, eyes wide. She leaned forward and whispered, “Infidelity.”
I felt a wave of sympathy for her. She might have been annoying, but nobody deserved to be cheated on. Missy tapped the screen, bringing up a video. As soon as it started playing, any sympathy I might have felt shriveled up and died like a neglected houseplant.
Somebody was cheating in that marriage, but it wasn’t Chad Thurston-Wallace, her soon-to-be ex-husband. Okay, so for a second I’d been interested when I’d seen the young, hot Latino guy who wasn’t Chad stroll into frame in what looked like a generic hotel room. Did Chad have a secret gay boyfriend? Given he was on the town council, he’d probably want to settle very quickly, and very generously, to keep this from getting out. But no, it wasn’t Chad who followed the hot guy into the frame. It was Missy, wearing a g-string and a pair of stripper heels.
I swallowed a groan and closed my eyes. I pinched the bridge of my nose.
“The infidelity part is just coming up,” Missy said helpfully.
“Okay,” I said, opening my eyes. That was a mistake because the video was still playing and the g-string had vanished. I tapped the screen frantically, trying to pause the video. Somehow I zoomed in instead and almost smashed the iPad when I flipped it over and slammed it on the table. I could still hear the audio, though. The sounds of Missy moaning wouldhaunt my dreams tonight. “I don’t think this is helpful to your case.”
“But it’s infidelity, right?” she asked me.
“Yes, but when someone brings proof of infidelity as a reason for divorce, it’s usually not their own.”
“Oh,” said Missy, blinking rapidly. From the iPad, she screamed, “Oh, papi!” which was more than I ever wanted to know about her.
I flipped the iPad over in one last attempt to shut it down, which again proved to be a mistake when I copped an eyeful of Missy bouncing up and down, riding her boyfriend like a mechanical bull. I slammed it face down on the table and shoved it away from me like it had the plague.
“But you said a fault divorce was quicker,” she said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose again. “Does your husband know about this?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I don’t believe there should be any secrets in a marriage.”
I stifled a sigh. Chad Thurston-Wallace’s lawyer was going to die laughing next time he saw me. Right before he hung my client and me out to dry.
Missy leaned forward and smoothed a nonexistent curl behind her ear. “Of course, I’ll be single soon,” she said, “so I’ll be free to date.”
Nope. Nope nope nope.
“Well, your boyfriend will be pleased to hear that,” I said brightly, deliberately misunderstanding her.
She huffed out a breath, then shuffled her chair closer and fluttered her fake lashes. “I’m not seeing anyone.”
I had to hand it to her, she was determined. But she was barking up the wrong tree here. Heck, she was in the wrong neckof the woods completely. She just hadn’t realized it, and I wasn’t about to tell her.
