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Mr. Parker cleared his throat. “Let me make you another offer. I assume your ex… you said he’s in jail, right?”
“Yes. He’ll eventually be eligible for parole, but I don’t know when,” I said, the very thought leaving bile to rise up in my throat.
But I knew a lot of my uncertainties would go away if I could just do my job well. Having a steady income would remove probably seventy-five percent of my stress. People didn’t know what it was like to be broke until they lived it.
The constant stress was debilitating. But I was getting out of this cycle. It would be behind me, sooner rather than later, if things went according to plan.
“If you find yourself needing legal assistance like a restraining order or what have you, I’ll handle it personally. No more legal bills.”
My throat caught, and I nodded, blinking quickly. “Oh my. That’s so generous. Thank you… Oh look at me, I’m a mess,” I said, willing my tears not to drop.
“You’re fine, Kait,” he said, snagging a tissue from his desk. “And you look very nice.”
So sweet. But I knew he couldn’t have meant his kind words the way my mind wanted him to.
“Thank you,” I said, standing. I needed to get out of there before the man started to think I was a pathetic loser. “Time to get back to my desk.”
Fuck. He was so close to me.
“I gotta learn how my job so I can start pitching in, right?” I said.
“That would be great.” He stood, offering me another handshake.
This time he clasped both my hands, and the warmth of his smile and the twinkle in his eyes had more than my heart beating a little faster.
“Good luck, Kait. I hope to see you around the office often.”
“When you’re not in court,” I laughed.
Shit. I didn’t even know if he was the type of attorney who even went to court.
I headed downstairs, my knees a little rubbery. No way was he looking at me like he actually wanted me. I was just another woman, and nowhere near the blonde perfection of the receptionist or my cubicle neighbor.
Still… it was nice to have an office crush. At the very least, it would give me something to think about tonight, when I had a date with my vibrator.
* * *
3
Mr. Stevens
A massive pileof training and orientation materials had buried my desk by the time I got back to it, and one of the junior paralegals was waiting for me to walk me through the files. By eleven that morning, I was going pedal to the metal. Mr. Parker hadn’t lied about the pace or intensity of the job.
It wasn’t that transcribing the stuff I’d been given was difficult. In fact, on one level, it was easy because lawyers spoke and wrote more clearly than doctors, and once I got past a few of the new terms, I was easily keeping up.
It was just that there were so many different files to get through. The amount of work was staggering. If they’d hired five of me, I’m not sure we would have made a dent in all that needed to be done.
Job security, yo.
The medical files I’d previously worked on were electronic, but the ATZ law firm was old school as the paralegal explained to me, still committed to physical copies of all their stuff. That meant that cardboard boxes, and all the papers that filled them, were piled high. Seriously. It was kind of a mess.
Some files were simple, little more than a color-coded file folder with an e-mail or two in them. They were easy—type up the notes, hit print, punch holes before filing it away to later be returned to the file room.
The more complex tasks took as long as an hour to transcribe. Those files were huge, sometimes taking up not just folders but binders, and each of the binders was a different part of the whole legal case. I’d seen that in Dimitri’s office—he’d once showed me the files for my divorce, and my simple little case had created enough paper to kill I didn’t know how many trees.
ATZ, by contrast, was a firm with a lot of attorneys. There were three named partners, a dozen junior partners, and twenty-five associates. That meant forty in all, and they were all handling multiple cases. And that many cases meant constant trips back and forth to the file room, often carrying heavy boxes.
Further adding to my new stress was that I’d been specifically warned that mis-filing paperwork was a grave fuckup that could result in termination.
