dinner.
Jessica Rowe stuck at average and ordinary all of her life. An only child, she grew up in a middle-class suburb outside of Seattle. She did well enough in school, but only by studying her brains out to push herself over that average line.
She’d never fit in.
The popular cliques ignored the slightly pudgy girl with her average looks, her awkward social skills, and dismal fashion sense. She wasn’t nerdy enough for the nerds, geeky enough for the geeks. Without any affinity or talent for sports, she never caught the attention of the jocks or coaches.
No one bullied her, as no one noticed her.
She was the human equivalent of beige.
She loved to write, and used her abundance of free time to create fantastic adventures for herself in her journals. And shared them with no one.
She graduated a virgin, with no savvy, sassy, or sympathetic bestie to boost her standings.
College didn’t throw open doors for her or change her status, as she simply melted away in the crowd. She aimed toward law only because crime interested her. Often she conjured up stories where she played the courageous heroine who foiled the master criminal. Or starred herself as the master criminal who foiled the authorities time and again.
She could admit, to herself, she preferred the latter. After all, she lived in the shadows as the best criminals did. The difference, as she saw it, was the courage—she lacked—to take what she wanted.
She graduated law school dead middle of her class, finally passed the bar on her fourth attempt. Meanwhile she had a brief relationship with another law student, gratefully lost her virginity, only to be dumped via text when he found someone more interesting.
She wrote a grisly short story about a woman’s revenge on a faithless lover, and celebrated alone when a mystery magazine published it under the name J. A. Blackstone.
She wrote two more while she slaved at a very average law firm for very average pay without any hope of advancement.
All of her life she lived by the rules she dreamed of breaking. She arrived at work early, left late. She lived frugally, drank moderately, dressed modestly.
Some of that changed when her grandfather died and left her, his only grandchild, three-quarters of a million dollars.
Her parents advised—and fully expected her—to invest it. She fully expected to do so. Then she sold her first book. Not the fiction she used as an escape hatch, but a true crime work she’d spent nearly two years researching on her off time, her vacations.
She took the somewhat meager advance and her inheritance, quit her job, and moved to San Francisco. Never in her life had she done anything so bold. At the age of forty, she rented a modest apartment and, since she never entertained, set up her work space in the living room.
And there, thrilled with her solitary life, started on her next book. She found the courage to press for interviews—victims, inmates, witnesses, investigators.
An hour each day, as a reward, she worked on fiction where she became a female assassin who took lives and lovers as she pleased.
The modest sales of her first book encouraged her. By the time she’d finished her second, she felt more than ready to tackle the next.
She had Charlotte Dupont to thank for her inspiration.
She caught an interview over her usual Wednesday-night dinner of sweet-and-sour shrimp, began to take notes. Her initial thought to have the Hollywood actress, the mother, as the central figure flipped when she began more serious research into the kidnapping.
Grant Sparks leaped out at her. So handsome, so magnetic.
And what he had done for love! The price he’d paid for it.
Many, she knew as she dug in, saw Dupont as the dupe, but she followed a different angle. The rich, the famous, the beautiful woman had used Sparks, and continued to do so. Trying to profit off the bungled kidnapping while he remained in prison.
By the time she requested an interview, she was primed for Grant Sparks’s smooth manipulations.
By the third visit she’d agreed to become his attorney of record. By the fourth she was deeply—and just as madly—in love with him.
He opened the doors for her, showed her the power and thrill of breaking the rules. She smuggled things in and out for him, passed messages to and from without a qualm.
She believed in his cause—as much as he allowed her to know of it. Crime—and hadn’t she always believed it—sometimes had justification. And punishment too often fell on the wrong people.
She would