Judgment

5

Juliana went right to her office, her “lobby” as the state’s arcane language called it, and sank unsteadily into her desk chair.

Her head was spinning, and she felt light-headed. She saw little pinpoints of light. She closed her eyes.

Matías from Chicago had said he was a businessman, in venture capital in Buenos Aires.

I’m afraid I was staring at you before.

How could this be? Harlan Madden had introduced the man as if they knew each other, as if they were colleagues.

Matías was a lawyer?

The man who had talked about his wife, his daughter. Who had cried when he came.

Was sitting at the defense table.

She was beginning to feel prickly hot and a little nauseated.

The man she was never going to see again, ships passing in the night as she’d put it, cliché or no cliché.

Two very separate worlds were somehow colliding, worlds she had been so meticulous about keeping apart.

After Matías had introduced himself, she could hear nothing but the thudding of her heart. Glenda Craft’s eyes had narrowed as she waited for Juliana to speak.

For a moment, she’d lost her train of thought. Then it came back to her. Wondering whether she was flushing visibly, she cleared her throat and said to Madden, “By Monday, I’d like to see all of the Slack chats between Ms. Meyers and Mr. Allerdyce and any that mention Ms. Meyers. I’ll then rule on the motion. I think that does it for today.”

She was slowly beginning to understand that she’d been used, seduced.

Set up.

He must have known she was the judge on the Wheelz case. She felt humiliated, disgusted.

She found herself running through her options. Maybe she should have said something as soon as the man walked into the courtroom. But what could she have said? She had no standing to protest an addition to the defense team. They had the right to add whomever they wanted, especially in the pretrial phase of a case.

He had the right to be there. It was their call.

And what if she’d said something like, Who are you, and why are you here? Matías would have produced credentials, no doubt showing him to be a member of the bar in good standing, and then what could she have said?

Aren’t you the guy I slept with one night last week in Chicago?

That would be the end of her marriage, the destruction of her reputation.

She could say exactly nothing.

There was a knock on the door. She could see a silhouette of a figure through the clouded-glass panel in her door.

“Come in.”

“Excuse me, Your Honor?”

Her clerk, Kaitlyn Hemming, a waifish woman in her mid-twenties with a pixie haircut, a recent Suffolk Law grad, stood there with a sheaf of papers in her hand. Juliana shared her law clerk with another judge.

“Got a minute?” Kaitlyn asked.

“Come on in,” Juliana said.

Time to get back to work.