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And there was a pretrial motion to sign.
“Here’s the Billings file you asked for,” Leah said, placing the manila envelope in front of Valerie. She opened it. Hesitated.
She hadn’t yet reported the smoking violation. Had decided instead to order twice-weekly drug testing. She wrote out the order.
Knowing full well that nicotine wasn’t going to show up there.
If they pulled Abraham from his home, moved him someplace in another part of the city—or state—they could monitor any potential nicotine problem. Right now, she just wanted to make
sure they didn’t have any more serious substance-abuse issues to deal with.
Leah didn’t ask any questions when Valerie handed back the signed form.
KIRK FELT A LITTLE BAD. But not enough to deny himself the victory. It was ten o’clock Wednesday night, and he’d convinced Valerie Simms to go for a walk with him. Just around her neighborhood. Which also happened to be his neighborhood, although he was fairly certain she didn’t know that. The boys were in bed, and, calling on her cell phone, he’d played on her sympathies. Tomorrow was Thanksgiving and he’d be spending it alone. Surely she could spare him a few minutes tonight.
“Your manipulation didn’t work, Chandler,” she said as she joined him at the end of her driveway. He couldn’t see the front door of her large, secluded ranch-style home. It was hidden behind a walled-in alcove surrounded by rosebushes. “I agreed because I wanted the exercise and didn’t feel safe going out alone.”
“No lunchtime skate today?”
“Yeah, I skated.”
She looked cute in black spandex pants that outlined her legs and derriere. He liked her in the tennis shoes she often ended up wearing around him instead of her usual high heels. The flat shoes made her seem less imposing. More accessible.
There were no sidewalks in the elite mountain community. Walking on the edge of the wide, quiet road, Kirk kept enough of a distance to avoid touching her. But it was hard. Something he hadn’t expected. Until that moment, he’d thought himself permanently immune to any kind of passion.
Let that be a warning to you, he told himself. If he could have extricated himself from the situation—this…relationship—without raising questions, he would’ve done so. Immediately.
“What are you doing on Thanksgiving?” she asked after several minutes of silence.
Visiting the cemetery, he could have told her. But didn’t. “Same thing I always do,” he answered instead. “Eating out.”
“Eating out? Whoever heard of eating out on Thanksgiving?”
“You’d be surprised.” Of course, in the past, eating out might have meant in a five-star resort restaurant at a table filled with powerful people, but now it meant a meal at whatever local diner he found open.
“You don’t have any family in town?”
“Nope.” He wouldn’t allow self-pity, understanding that a man reaps what he sows. He’d rarely shared the holiday with his parents or his ex-wife and his daughter, when they’d been part of his life.
They were walking too slowly to get any real physical benefit, but the pace allowed him to see when she peered at him in the comforting semidarkness, which was broken only by a moon that hung bright and low—and an occasional muted street lamp.
“You alone in the world, Chandler?”
So many questions—and just when he’d realized there was a real temptation to become more intimate.
Odd, to want something so badly and not go after it. At thirty-four, he was forging his way through yet another new experience.
“No,” he told her, refusing her sympathy. “I’m an only child, but my parents are healthy and thriving—in a home on a golf course in Florida.”
“Oh!”
He took minor pleasure in having surprised the good judge.
“So what about you, what do you and the boys have planned?” he asked. A good offense was often the best defense.
“Dinner at home,” she said. “We were invited to some friends’, but—”
“Brian probably wouldn’t eat.”
