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Chapter One
Shane
“I’m not going to get the job, am I?” I ask the balding man sitting in front of me, who very distinctly wants me out of his office. He’s been fidgeting in his chair and eyeing the paper bag sitting on the corner of his desk since I first sat down across from him. I’ve been staring at the birthmark or mole on his bald pate, barely hidden by his combover, and wondering if it’s cancerous.
Maybe I’ve made an overly straight-forward remark, but then again, I’m tired. It’s a couple of weeks into the new year, and this is approximately the thirtieth job I’m not going to get after quitting my old firm on Thanksgiving Day. My former boss, Fred Myles, warned me I wouldn’t get a legal job within thirty miles of Asheville if I quit.
But he didn’t leave me much of a choice. He’d agreed to defend two people I knew to be guilty. That’s not the kind of thing that would normally stand in my way—everyone deserves good defense—but the two people in question are the parents of one of my best friends, Lucas Burke. And he’s the one who turned them in.
We’re something like family, me and Burke and our friends Leonard, Drew, and Danny. Especially Danny and me. And screwing Burke over would have meant screwing all of them over.
Still, I’d actually considered staying. At one point, I’d felt certain I would stay, personal consequences be damned. I’d worked hard for that job. I wouldn’t say I loved it, but I felt a devotion to it that ran deeper than love. When it came down to it, though, I couldn’t bring myself to stay. It was either loyalty or weakness that pulled me back, although I suppose some people would call loyalty a weakness.
When I left, I told myself Myles was all bark. He’s more fossil than man, and his balls have probably shrunken into his diaphragm by now. But what do you know?
Turns out the old geezer was right about something.
Every good practice in the county has denied me, and so have most of the bad ones. I actually interviewed for a couple of ambulance chasers last week, men who have a billboard with a crying man on it that says, Someone hit you with your car? We’ll turn you into a star.
It felt like the bottom of the barrel, the job I wanted so little I’d get it by default. But Fred Myles was a godparent to one of the guy’s sons, so the interview lasted all of five minutes. I got the sense he’d asked me in just to get an adrenaline rush from crushing me.
The man sitting across from me, whose name I couldn’t pull out of my pudding of a brain if I tried, frowns at me and says, “Well, no. You came in here reeking of whiskey, and you don’t even seem to know what this firm does.”
Guilty.
“But the reason I’m not getting it is Myles, isn’t it?” I press. “You know Fred Myles?”
He frowns at me, his features pinching together. “I’ve never heard of the man.”
Huh. Well at least I lost this one honestly. That’s almost a relief.
I salute him and get up, a little unsteady on my feet, because, yeah, I may have indulged too much last night, or very early this morning.
“Take it easy,” I say. “Enjoy the muffin.”
“It’s a scone,” he tells my back.
Perfect. I am officially less interesting than a dry, shriveled puck of a baked good.
I leave the office and wander the streets for a while, feeling the uncomfortable press of having no destination and nowhere to be. Burke and Leonard run a home restoration business, and they’ve offered to give me work until I find a new job, but I didn’t go to law school so I could run around with a hammer. Even so, as the months have crept past, doubt has entered my mind, sticky and cloying and not at all like me.
What if I don’t find a job here?
What if I have to move?
What if I can’t find a job anywhere?
I loathe self-doubt almost as much as I loathe Fred Myles for taking my life away from me.
Because my job was my life. I gave everything I was to that asshole’s firm, spending nights and weekends there. My mother framed the photo of me getting made partner, and I hung it up on my wall. It’s still there, right next to a wooden sign reading Bless this mess. Because when your mother has swung from one bout of depression to another for more than twenty years, you hang up any damn thing she gives you.
I walk until I feel warm despite the January chill, then finally duck into a bakery.
“Coffee and a scone,” I tell the woman behind the counter, because I hate myself a little right now, and for some reason it seems appropriate to indulge in a baked good I will not enjoy. She’s a pretty brunette with blue-green eyes, the kind of woman I’d normally try to charm, but I barely notice or care.
“What kind of scone?” she asks. “We have thirty varieties.”
“Surprise me.”
