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Hunter chewed the inside of his cheek.
“How intriguing,” he said. “You fight against injustice, one case at a time, and then you take on an armed assailant twice your size. You’re like a little leopard, aren’t you?”
I blinked. “A what?”
He looked out at the road in front of him.
“A leopard is gorgeous…”He finds me gorgeous?“Yet unassuming on the outside. But it’s one of the best fighters in the animal kingdom. It doesn’t matter if its opponent is a bigger cat with a stronger jaw or has more physical strength. The leopard is an exceptional fighter with great agility, never backing down from a battle.”
His eyebrow quirked, as if he were enchanted by me, making my body warm.
“As a criminal lawyer, do you see the injustice in the legal system?” I asked.
“The justice system isn’t perfect,” he admitted. “But I’ve come to believe that some people are capable of doing terrible things.”
On both sides of his Aston Martin, some of the tallest buildings in the world flanked the four-lane road, canopied by a cloudy sky. The pedestrians walking along the sidewalk always seemed happier on Fridays, tasting the weekend coming before us.
“Is that why you became a prosecutor?” I asked.
Hunter shifted in his seat, appearing uncomfortable with my question.
Which was odd. In any profession, one was often asked what motivated them to choose it. And he had just asked me the same question.
“When I inherited the money from my father’s estate, I started a tech business while I went to Harvard.”
Of course he went to Harvard.
“How did you start a business and go to school at the same time?”
“I hired an executive staff to help run the business. When it grew to a billion-dollar market cap, I lost the hunger to spend the rest of my life running it, though. Guess it was the challenge of starting it I’d been after. Maybe I’d wanted to walk a mile in my dad’s shoes or something because he’d helped grow my grandfather’s business.” Hunter put his turn signal on and glided the car through a bend. “I remained the sole equity owner and left the daily operations to my executive team while I went to law school.”
Geez. Who has a side hustle that grows to a billion dollars? People who can afford to hire others to run the business for them, I guess.
It didn’t go unnoticed that he never answered my question about why he had become a prosecutor. Law school was a grind, and you couldn’t get through it without a serious level of passion.
“How long have you been working on the case?” Hunter asked.
My whole life.
“A couple of years.” For this particular motion, anyway. But throughout college and law school, I had been studying and researching any possible outlet to get Dad released.
“You truly think he’s innocent?”
“I know he is.”
“It’s a long shot and a lot of work to get a habeas corpus granted,” Hunter mused.
Yeah, but what was the alternative?
“What would you do if someone you loved was wrongfully convicted and was sentenced to serve their entire life in prison because of it? How far would you go to save them?”
Hunter stared out the windshield, taking a deep breath, and when he spoke again, his voice had dropped to almost a whisper.
“It’s tragic,” he said. “How one event can haunt every moment of your life.”
A bitter ache twisted in the pit of my stomach, a biting reminder of the shared pain etched deep within our souls. We were both tormented by our fathers’ absences. His dad had been snatched away by the cold, indiscriminate hand of death. Mine, ensnared by the unforgiving steel bars of imprisonment. The torment was the same yet uniquely different—a kaleidoscope of despair that shadowed our lives in sorrow.
Yet, as I studied him, I noticed an added depth to his grief. It wasn’t just the usual mourning; there was a tinge of something more, an unspoken agony that lurked in the corner of his mournful gaze.
