“This is my client,” I said to him, quick and sotto voce. “Head left, and we’re at the end.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but I was already stepping out, blocking Oakleigh’s path and readying a sharky smile. She tried to sidestep, still engrossed with her phone. I matched her, and her gaze finally fixed on me long enough to realize who I was.
“Hello, Mrs. Winkley,” I said. She flicked her hand, maybe waving hello, maybe shooing me aside. She angled right and I matched her again, staying between her and the door. Behind me, Julian slipped out and headed toward our offices. “I understand we need to schedule a meeting?”
At last she spoke. “Do you? Because I understand that we should have met an hour ago. I don’t have time now. I’m not that interested in being shunted off on you, anyway.”
I remembered Oakleigh’s voice as high-pitched and kittenish. Not right now. She looked a little sweaty, a little pink, and her practiced lilt was bordering on screechy. In this morning’s deposition, Oakleigh had lost her crap. Nick’s panicked text had actually read, “she lops he crake,” but I was fluent in autofill. On the phone, he’d told me in a terse whisper that when Oakleigh’s fit was at its zenith, the husband muttered something Nick did not quite catch. Oakleigh understood it, though. She physically attacked her husband, leaping up and beating him about the head and shoulders with her outsize Hermès bag. The camera was rolling, and the husband cowered perfectly. His lawyer tried to look shocked and appalled instead of so thrilled he was practically having an orgasm. He was now threatening to take the case in front of a jury if negotiations didn’t turn his way.
Most of our divorces settled in mediation. If mediation failed, we went before a judge. But in Georgia, either party could choose to let a jury decide who got the dogs and who got the silver spoons. It was risky, but a viable strategy, especially if the client was a long-suffering saint with a spouse who sinned spectacularly on YouTube.
Juries could be punishing, much more so than judges, and they came in with a host of biases. Now that there was video of our client beating her husband into jam with a handbag that cost more than the average Atlanta juror’s monthly income, a jury trial was a real threat.
Nick did a lot of things beautifully, including tennis, oral sex, and mediation, but he did not do juries. Neither did Catherine. My name attached to a case could often make opposing counsel feel re-interested in fair. They’d go right back to mediation. And if it didn’t? Fine with me.
Divorce by jury was all about which lawyer could spin a better tale, and I’d grown up with a woman who could make a heap of stolen parts sound truer than the truth. She could shade a story I’d heard a thousand times until all at once the meaning inverted and it became its own opposite. I was her kid. I operated inside the ethics of my profession, but I could spin like nobody’s business.
That made Winkley v. Winkley the exact type of case my partners tossed to me. I had not been there to catch it. Again. Dammit. I could feel a familiar post-freakout headache rising up behind my left eye.
“You’re not being shunted, Mrs. Winkley.” I spoke in my lowest register. I’d met Oakleigh only twice, but I knew her type well. She reminded me of a milky-colored Arab pony one of Kai’s old boyfriends had owned. She was a flirty, saucy piece of business, but if you turned your back, she’d sink her teeth deep into the meat of your shoulder. Oakleigh and the pony both responded better to an alto.
“Evans. I’m taking back my maiden name,” she snapped, tossing her head. “And now you’ve let my elevator get away.” She reached around me and pressed the call button.
I said, “Since we have a minute, you may as well explain what made you—” I caught myself about to say lose your shit to an already door-bound client. Damn Julian Bouchard and his familiar eyes. I edited on the fly. “—made you so unhappy at this morning’s meeting?”
Oakleigh twitched one shoulder in a furious, small shrug. “Clark robbed me.” She must have seen confusion flash on my face, because she said, “Clark? My husband?”