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I smiled at her. “Ok. Mrs. Foley, let’s get started from the beginning and I’ll see how I can help you get your job back.”
“You can call me Lana,” she said. “It seems strange for you to keep saying ‘Mrs. Foley’.”
I nodded. “All right, Lana.” I resumed taking notes.
“And I never said I wanted my job back.”
“But you want some kind of compensation?”
“Yes. Of course.” Her eyebrows pinched together.
“What is the name of the company?”
“Company?”
“Yes. Where did you work?”
She cleared her throat. “In the Senate.”
I blinked. “As in Congress? The U.S. Senate?”
“That’s right.”
I pressed my elbows into the planes of my desk. I felt my stomach turn as I asked the next question.
“And your boss? Who is it?”
Lana sighed. “Todd Mitcherson.”
“Senator Mitcherson?” My voice cracked.
“I take it you know him.” She stared at me blankly.
“He’s a U.S. senator.” I tried to keep my words steady. Keep the judgment off my lips. Keep it hidden that I knew exactly who he was. The man Preston worked for.
“Yes. He is. And he shouldn’t have fired me.”
“I think I need you to start at the beginning. The very beginning.”
There was a weariness that had settled into my shoulders. It ran deep between the tissue, twisting the tendons with snaps of fatigue. They ached from all angles. I lugged my messenger bag over my arm and started down the stairs outside the clinic. If I rushed, I could make the last shuttle back to the Metro.
I didn’t like walking on campus at night by myself, but I held my phone firmly in my hand and trudged forward. It reminded me of all the seminars I’d attended in college. The ones where safety officers would fill an auditorium with girls and tell us how to avoid an unwanted attack. As if there was any other kind. They would tell us to always walk together. Check in with your buddy. If you saw someone suspicious, don’t make eye contact. It was a freshman requirement for all girls to attend, but I didn’t remember any seminars for the guys. Something about how not to attack women. Keep you dicks in your pants and your hands to yourself. I scowled, marching forward. I didn’t want to miss that bus.
Mrs. Foley was the first of twenty women I saw today. Twenty. I used to go an entire week at the private practice without seeing that many clients.
I hustled toward the stop at the corner feeling part super woman and part exhausted.
The driver nodded without smiling as I climbed onboard and took the first seat. I was a little nervous walking through the Metro station at night alone, but I was only one stop away from our neighborhood. Women in the city did this all the time.
I thought about the women today. What they dealt with. The decisions they made they had brought them to my office. The faith they had put in people who let them down. It was overwhelming and infuriating. There weren’t enough of us fighting to help them. Today I had worked with twenty, but if Addie had been there, we would have helped forty. And if one more attorney had been added to the clinic it would have been sixty. There was no stopping the hemorrhage.
My fingers touched the top of the metal bar, hanging from the train’s ceiling and I forgot about the women and remembered my ride with Vaughn last night. I smiled to myself. I liked how he steadied me with his strength.
He had the kind of presence I’d never seen in another man. He was comfortable in his own skin. He was confident in his decisions. That voice. Those eyes. He had me upside down.
I skirted off the Metro and scampered up the stairs quickly and onto the sidewalk. I liked being above ground and within sight of home.
Where did Vaughn get that confidence? How did he stroll through life, making his own wake?
