She looked fucking breathtaking.
“Wow. I wasn’t expecting you guys so early.” She smiled when her gaze landed on Allie. “Katie’s in the backyard. It’s a beautiful morning. Let me show you the way.”
Allie bounced and gave her a hug before running around her to get inside.
“It’s okay,” she called over her shoulder. “I’ll find her. It’ll be a surprise.”
Laurie chuckled, stepping back to open the door wider to let me in.
“Sorry about the mess and the clothes.” The tops of her cheeks got a rosy hue. “I’d have put on something more appropriate if I thought you’d be here this early.”
“It’s no problem. I did some research for your case last night, and I might’ve gotten overeager about discussing it. I also made the mistake of telling Allie we were coming by your place sometime today, and she basically dragged me to the car right away.”
It was really difficult to keep my eyes on hers with so many other things on display that I’d rather have been looking at—like her long legs in those shorts and the way her sweater hung a little off her one shoulder—but I managed it okay.
Perks of having an excellent poker face.
“Come on in. Can I get you some coffee?” She closed the door once I’d followed her into their entrance hall.
“Yes. Please.” I peeked past her, expecting mountains of boxes and bubble wrap. While it was easy to see they weren’t all the way moved in yet, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d expected. “Did you get some more unpacking done?”
“No.” She waved her hand as she led me to the kitchen. “I’ve just become more organized in my procrastination. I moved all the rest of the stuff to the empty rooms and the garage a couple of weeks ago.”
Katie must have come inside before even I had because I heard Allie giggling and then saw the girls running onto the lawn in the back when I caught a glimpse of it through the living-room windows ahead of me.
There was a laptop on the couch and a steaming mug on the coffee table beside it. A blank document was open on the screen, and I frowned. “Did we interrupt you while you were trying to write?”
She laughed but there wasn’t much humor in the sound. “Trying is the operative word in that sentence. You can’t interrupt something that’s not happening anyway.”
My jaw tightened and I let out a string of curses in my head. “Let’s hope we’ll have you writing again soon.”
Laurie made me coffee before going to collect hers, and motioned me into the breakfast nook in the kitchen when she was done. I set my backpack with my laptop and a surprise for her in it down on the floor before wrapping my fingers around my mug.
“Okay, so like I said, I’ve been doing some research about your case. You mentioned yesterday that the movie is being made about the first book you wrote. Is that correct?”
She startled a bit at my tone but nodded while I vowed to dial it back a notch. I sipped my coffee and forced myself to switch up my mindset. I wasn’t there to cross-examine her, and she wasn’t a client I’d had in my office many times who was used to the drill.
We were in her house on a Saturday morning, and our girls were playing together outside. “I need to know what happened from your perspective. You wrote the book and then saw the trailer. Do you know if the script is verbatim your novel? Who wrote the screenplay?”
“I haven’t seen the script, but I’ve been keeping an eye on the trailers, and a lot of what I’ve seen is verbatim. When I first hired a lawyer, I did as much research as I could about the movie and I wrote a basic summary for him. Would you like me to send it to you?”
“Yes. Please.”
As we went over everything, her walls started coming down. She told me about her story and the world it was set in, and I saw a light in her eyes that I’d never seen before.
Her passion was clear as day, but when she started talking about the similarities between her book and the movie, I saw her folding in on herself. The light went back out, and the woman in front of me seemed to physically shrink.
My own reaction surprised me more than hers. It was immediate and visceral, the need to demolish the fuckers who’d stolen her words and her fiery spirit with my bare hands rising up in me almost unabated.
Get it together, Jacob. You’re no good to her if you’re just as emotional. I heard the familiar words in my head, but it was more difficult to let it go this time. I hadn’t felt such a strong wave of emotion about a case in a long time—if ever.
Time for a break. For both of us.
“I’ve got something for you,” I said when she fell silent after telling me about how the final fight scene she’d crafted had played out before her eyes in one of the trailers. Reaching down to lift my backpack, I unzipped it at the top and pulled out my surprise.
She frowned when she saw the doll we’d both gone shopping for on Black Friday. “Why would you bring that?”
“I wanted you to have it. I managed to get my hands on another one.” The last part was a lie. I’d tried to track down another one, but I hadn’t had any luck so far. I doubted I would find one before Christmas.
Ultimately, though, I told myself that Allie would be happy to know she’d made her best friend that happy. Sometimes, that was what it was all about. I had no idea whether it was true that she would agree, but it helped me lessen my guilt about not keeping the toy for my own kid.
A blinding smile spread across Laurie’s face when she reached for it, and seeing it made my heart soar. “Thank you so much. I tried a few more places, but they’re all out. You have no idea how happy this is going to make Katie.”
“I have a bit of an idea.” Which was why I felt guilty about not keeping it for Allie, but after the year she’d had, I figured Katie’s mom needed the win a little bit more than I did. “Has Katie been collecting these for long?”
“As long as I can remember,” she said, and she suddenly got all choked up. “She’s such a unique girl with such a big heart. She never asks for anything. I know I can’t give her what she really wants, but when she actually asked for this, I swore I would go to the ends of the earth to find it.”
“What do you mean ‘you can’t give her what she really wants’?” When I looked at Laurie again, really looked at her, there was such a well of pain in her expression that I felt an echo of it in my soul.
She sighed heavily, swallowing as she stared into her coffee like it held the answers to all her questions. “Nothing I can do to bring her mother back. I’m a poor substitute for my sister and I know it. It doesn’t matter how hard I try. I’ll never be as good of a mother to Katie as she was.”
Those few short sentences made all my preconceived ideas about her fall like the houses of cards they were. So many things suddenly made even more sense, and though I only felt that echo of her pain in my soul, it suddenly seemed to radiate from me.
“What happened to her?” I asked before clearing my throat and clarifying. “Your sister.”
I couldn’t believe the story that unfolded. Even though I knew I had no right to do it, I reached for her hands across the table and wound our fingers together while she told me about it.