Two weeks ago, I’d accepted a position as an assistant district attorney. I wouldn’t be arguing the big cases or anything. Not for a while yet, but at least I had the ever important foot in the door. Once I'd proven myself, I'd get to start on the big stuff.
“Are you excited?”
At the question, I looked over at Lori Martin, the attorney the firm had hired to take my clients. Since Leslie had left a couple months back, I carried too heavy a load to just shunt my cases off onto others in the firm. The divorce business was booming.
Smiling at Lori, I nodded. “I am.”
For as long as I could remember, this was all I ever wanted to do. Some little girls grew up dreaming about being a nurse, a doctor, a teacher. Not me.
A friend of mine from high school had majored in archaeology. That had been her dream ever since she’d been a kid. Working in the garden with her mom one year, she’d found a bone and in her child’s mind, it had been a bone from some rare, undiscovered dinosaur. In reality, it'd been a dog’s hind leg, but that hadn’t mattered in the long run. It sparked her interest and she'd gone for it.
I’d always wanted to be a lawyer. A prosecutor, to be specific. Working at Webster & Steinberg had only been a stepping stone.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have some fun little story about why I'd decided I wanted to put bad guys away. My desire had come from tragedy.
Late one night, more than twenty years ago, sirens had woken me. I’d crawled into bed with my parents and gone back to sleep. As a child, that wailing sound had been common enough in my neighborhood.
The next morning, both of my parents had been unusually quiet. My father had gone to work like usual, but Mom stayed home with me. When I asked her why my sitter hadn't come yet, she told me my sitter had gone away. I persisted, but all she'd say was that Miss Jenny was gone and I'd understand when I was older.
The problem was, I'd always been a precocious child, too nosy for my own good, and I discovered the truth myself a couple of days later when I'd seen a newspaper with a picture of Jenny.
Mom had come in when I'd been sounding out the headline.
She’d tried to take the paper away, but I’d already figured out enough of the words to ask the question.
What’s dead, Mama?
My mother had softened the blow as much as she could, but how could anything about murder be soft to a four year-old? I'd understood sick and old, but I'd known Miss Jenny hadn't been either one of those.
Mom told me that the man who'd killed Miss Jenny had been a different kind of sick and that he hadn't meant it. My childish mind had accepted that, but I'd come back to her explanation years later when the older sister of a boy in my class had been murdered. At twelve, I'd been old enough to read the stories in the newspapers and online. And I'd been old enough to research when I recognized the name of the man's previous victim.
Jennifer Kyle.
That’s when I'd found out that Jenny's killer had been an ex who'd beaten her before. That he'd been arrested with her blood still on him, but a defense attorney had found a loophole that had let the murderer go free. Free to kill my classmate's sister.
That was when I'd decided what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be the one who made the bad guys go to jail.
Soon, I'd be doing it. Very soon.
Looking over at Lori, I nodded again. “Yes. I’m very excited.”
My excitement must've been showing on my face when I walked into Club Privé that night. My friends were already waiting for me at our regular table, Carrie's and Krissy's men at their sides. Carrie and her extremely rich and hot fiancé, Gavin Manning, ran the club together and they were almost sickeningly in love. Not that Krissy and her equally gorgeous and wealthy man, DeVon, were any better. They both lived on the West Coast, but DeVon was rich enough that he and Krissy came to visit as often as possible.
I hugged Leslie first as she stood to push out my chair. Krissy was next, and then I was in Carrie's arms for a quick, but heartfelt embrace.
I didn’t have a chance for anything more than that, though.
Carrie's eyes narrowed as she released me. “You’re up to something. It's written all over your face, Dena. Tell us. What is it? Tell us.”
Krissy leaned forward a little bit, her expression speculative.
Shit. I'd forgotten how intuitive the two of them could be. Even Leslie was looking at me with suspicion, and she usually let me alone.
“You're right, Carrie,” Krissy agreed, nodding sagely. “You’re up to something, Dena. I know that smirk. What's going on?”
I reached for the glass of water in front of me and took a sip, trying to buy time. I didn't want to just blurt it out. These three women were my best friends, the closest things I'd ever had to sisters. They would understand why this was so important to me.