At 12:30 on Monday, December 14, my bank app lay open on the kitchen table.
Available balance: $3,180.00
I did the math anyway.
I started with $9,400.
I took off $1,300 for the office.
Then $1,640 for December rent, paid on the first.
Then $412 for COBRA.
Then $2,868 for the malpractice policy.
Jonah's retainer sat in trust, $5,500 I couldn't touch.
The kitchen was cold.
I'd turned the heat down a week ago.
A letter lay beside the phone.
Re: Delia Reyburn, Reg. No. 60592 — Request for Response
The regulator wanted my answer to Clay's complaint within twenty days.
Lorna's envelope had held seventy-five thousand dollars.
I had never broken the seal.
Maybe I should've signed.
I let myself think it for one full minute.
Then I remembered the sentence above her signature line.
It said I had done what Clay did.
I put the letter in my bag and caught the bus downtown.
At 3:00 I sat in a status conference on the fourth floor of the courthouse.
It lasted forty minutes.
Lorna didn't come.
Her outside counsel came with Clay.
The judge set the order of argument for Wednesday.
Then she repeated the deadline.
Exhibits closed at five today.
At 3:41 the hallway outside Courtroom 424 was crowded.
About fifteen lawyers stood between the benches and the elevators.
Most of them had come for other cases.
They stayed for ours.
Clay walked up to me with a three-ring binder.
Bea Fontaine stood behind him with a hand truck and two banker's boxes.
The firm had sent her over with its hearing copies.
"Exhibit 3 is my email," Clay said.
"Your chats are attached."
He held out the binder.
"Read them before the jail tour."
Two lawyers by the water fountain laughed.
"Both files?" I asked.
"Just the chats," Clay said.
"The other one's sealed."
He said it like he'd read the order.
I took the binder.
He held out a receipt slip and a pen.
"Sign for it, Delia."
"Like a paralegal."
I signed the slip and wrote the time beside my name.
"Receipt time 3:41," I said.
I handed back his pen.
He clipped it inside his jacket and walked to the elevators.
He didn't stay to watch me read.
He never read anything once he'd signed it.
Jonah came out of the courtroom and stood beside me.
I opened the binder to Exhibit 3.
The firm had reprinted the email.
Someone had typed a note under the tab.
Reprinted with OK-All expanded to show every inbox was ours.
Page one was all names.
Partners, associates, the mailroom.
Bea was on line 4.
I turned to page 2.
Down the hall, the elevator doors closed on Clay.
Every line on page 1 ended in the firm's own domain.
Line 61 didn't.
"Line sixty-one," I said aloud.
"Bexley Harrow."
@bexleyharrow.com
Jonah leaned in.
"Line sixty-two," I said.
It was the same domain.
The hallway went quiet.
The lawyer by the fountain lowered his coffee.
"Those aren't firm inboxes," Jonah said.
"Not until Friday," I said.
"Did Clay see this?"
"He was at the elevator."
"It's his exhibit," I said.
"He didn't think he needed to read it."
Two strangers in green lanyards had stood at the back wall on November 16.
Now they had lines on page 2.
They had been sent a sealed brief they had no right to open.
The firm had printed their addresses itself, to prove the opposite.
At 3:44 Bea let go of the hand truck.
She came over and looked at the page in my hands.
"I filed that ticket."
"November second."
"Lorna told me to."
She took a folded sheet from her cardigan pocket.
"I print everything I file."
"Thirty years."
"Does Lorna know you kept a copy?" Jonah asked.
"She never asked."
She put it in my hand and went back to her boxes.
I unfolded it.
Jonah read it over my shoulder.
"Lorna added them herself!"
He said it loudly enough for the whole hallway to hear.
Fifteen heads turned.
Nobody laughed this time.
I sat on the bench by the elevators and opened my laptop.
"How long do you need?" Jonah asked.
"Less than I have."
I scanned the sheet with my phone.
I labeled it, captioned it, and attached a certificate of service.
At 4:52 I served it on all counsel as Exhibit R-7.
Eight minutes before the exchange closed.
The confirmation came back with the scan attached.
IT Ticket #OK-44718 — 11/02/26
OK-All +2 (Bexley Harrow) — per L. Keane