Doubt (Caroline Auden #1) - C. E. Tobisman Page 0,9
Internet for shoes.”
Deena cocked her head at Caroline’s suit. “Secondhand? I’ve gotten some wicked pieces at secondhand stores. But just accessories, not the suit. Never the suit.” She shook her head and made a tutting sound as if such a thing were too outrageous to contemplate.
Heat rose to Caroline’s cheeks. She’d bought the navy suit on sale at an outlet. She thought it worked, that she came off as polished. But seeing herself reflected in Deena’s eyes, she felt like a child playing dress-up in her mother’s mildewed closet of dowdy old looks.
“You’re old for a first-year, aren’t you?” Deena asked. She paused long enough to suggest her torrent of words might have come to an end. Or at least have taken a short break.
“I worked for a few years as a software engineer,” said Caroline.
“Computers? That’s interesting,” Deena said in a tone that made clear it really wasn’t. “Why’d you change to law?”
“To help people,” Caroline said.
Deena crossed her arms and smirked.
“Really,” Caroline insisted. “The law is a great tool for helping people avoid having . . . bad things happen to them. I had an experience once with it . . . once.”
Caroline closed her mouth to stem the flow of information. Deena didn’t need to know about her family’s legal troubles. Or her unforgivable part in causing them.
“What, you get picked up for prostitution or something?” Deena bark-laughed and then made an exaggerated show of looking over Caroline’s suit again.
Caroline stayed silent. The guilt that coiled next to her heart like a constant companion stirred, but she refused to give it voice. This wasn’t the time or the place or the person to spill her story about the sordid reasons she’d left the tech industry.
“Come on. You can tell me. Why’d you go into the law?” Deena asked, her eyebrows arched in prurient curiosity that promised repetition far and wide of whatever Caroline answered.
“To help people,” Caroline repeated. It wasn’t the whole truth, and they both knew it.
After a beat, Deena waved off the nonanswer. “Well, I’m a lawyer because I didn’t want to be a doctor like my mom. She’s head of neurology at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York, but she’s spending the month here at Northridge Hospital because my family’s thinking of moving out west, Lord knows why. We’ve already established you people have never heard of a cronut.”
Deena glanced at Caroline, then to the door of the war room, then back to Caroline. She pursed her lips and shook her head.
“Oh my God, don’t tell me Louis stuck you with reading those articles for SuperSoy.” Deena began tutting again.
“Yes,” Caroline said, “he wants me to find a link between—”
“SuperSoy and kidney damage,” Deena finished for her. “There’s nothing to find. I’ve looked. Everyone has.”
Deena regarded Caroline with a raised eyebrow. “I suppose it’s a good assignment for the new kid, since you can’t mess up looking for something that isn’t there.”
Caroline weighed her responses. She wanted to tell Deena to go screw herself, but that hardly seemed polite on the first day of work.
“Maybe he wants to make sure you didn’t miss something,” Caroline said finally.
Deena’s face flushed. “Trust me, you’ll find nothing. But if you need some help or whatever, my door’s always open,” she said before walking down the hall to her office and closing her door.
Caroline looked in the direction Deena had disappeared. She found she didn’t care whether Deena or Dale or anyone else had already read the articles. She rarely trusted anyone else’s judgment. In this way, she and Louis were similar, she decided.
She needed to earn Louis’s faith.
The articles inside the war room were her path to doing just that.
Caroline’s plan to fly off to the rescue of SuperSoy plaintiffs everywhere deflated at the sight before her. Six bankers boxes sat atop a Carrara marble table that filled most of the conference room’s square footage. A quick look revealed that each box held two large binders of articles. And each binder held up to five articles.
Caroline did the math. Six hours to read sixty articles. It was a dauntingly large elephant for a very small snake to digest in woefully little time.
Her chest tightened. Panic threatened to rise like a thunderstorm in the distance, just below the horizon. It didn’t matter that no one else expected her to find anything in the many volumes on the table before her. Louis did, and his was the only expectation that mattered.
Taking a calming breath, Caroline forced the panic away.