Love Proof (Laws of Attraction) - By Elizabeth Ruston Page 0,4

your work.”

“You’ll see me again,” Marcela said. “Our company got the contract for all of the west coast depositions. I’ll be at some of them next week.”

“See you then,” Sarah said. She accidentally caught Joe’s eye, and quickly looked back at her laptop screen.

“Sarah, can I talk to you for a minute?” Joe asked.

“Not right now,” she said. She typed a few more lines, just as cover.

“Sarah?”

“What?” she answered, not bothering to hide her annoyance.

“Can I interest you in lunch?”

“No, thank you.”

“You buying?” Paul Chapman asked him.

“No,” Joe said. “I was going to make Sarah pay.”

Funny, she thought, looking him straight in the eye, I was thinking the same thing about you.

Three

The woman at the afternoon deposition had hair not that different from Sarah’s. It was that same dark auburn, not the lighter shade of red Sarah always thought was so pretty. It had the same thick texture, and even though the woman had obviously blown it straight, Sarah could imagine the thousand crazy, mini spirals just waiting to pop out again the minute her hair was wet.

“It used to be long,” the woman told Chapman after he finished an hour’s worth of irrelevant questions and finally got around to asking about her hair. “Even longer than hers,” she said, pointing at Sarah. “I was growing it out since high school. People said it was my nicest feature. Then that iron thing of yours caught it on fire and now all I’ve got left is this . . . ”

She held up a hank of the shortened ends, but Chapman couldn’t be bothered to look.

“Did you call the toll-free number on the Atheena website?” he asked.

“Did I what?”

“The toll-free number,” he said. “It’s there for a reason. It’s under Customer Service.”

“No, I didn’t call some number,” the woman snapped, her anger practically steaming out through her pores. “A friend of mine had to rush me to Urgent Care. My scalp was burned. You could smell the hair—it was disgusting. They had to cut a whole bunch of it off—even the part that was okay—so they could put bandages all over my head. And then I still had scabs all over for weeks—”

“Mm-hm, mm-hm,” Chapman answered, sounding bored and still not looking up from his notes.

Sarah saw the woman turn to Joe and give him a look that asked, Am I allowed to punch him?

As soon as Chapman finished, Sarah jumped right in. “Ms. McIntyre, I’m sorry we didn’t get to hear your whole story before. Please start at the beginning again and walk us through it, moment by moment. You said you felt the unit getting hotter . . . ”

Sarah enjoyed the psychology of law as much as she enjoyed law itself. She liked trying to understand what people wanted and needed in every situation so she could mold a case to her advantage.

And just as Sarah expected she would, Joe’s client seemed to calm down—to sound less hostile—the more Sarah let her talk. She had seen it before with people involved in law suits: this desperate and angry need to make someone listen, to feel like they’d finally been heard.

It was why some parties refused to settle until they had their “day in court.” Sometimes all it took was that one day. They just wanted the formality of sitting at a table next to their lawyer, with their opponent at a table nearby, and a judge sitting behind the raised bench in front of them. They wanted to see the faces of a jury looking at them sympathetically. They wanted to see all the trappings of law they’d grown up watching on TV: the Hear ye, hear ye, all rise, the Honorable So-and-So presiding, even though that wasn’t how it was in the real world.

And more times than not, just that one day was enough. Litigation was nerve-wracking. People didn’t realize how stressful it was to actually be part of the pageantry of court. To have to sit there silent and unemotional while people told lies about you.

That was how it always sounded, Sarah knew: like lies. It was the nature of law to pit one person’s story against another person’s completely different one, but lay people didn’t understand how brutal that would feel while they had to be on their best behavior in front of a judge and jury.

So even though many lawyers gave up trying to settle a case once they began their opening statements, Sarah always scheduled time at the end of that first day