I knew what I was doing, and I walked into that purgatory after a flame that singed my mind. The devil still walks beside me, but I choose him for comfort.
“The complicit nature of your actions regarding your father’s death and potential crimes surrounding it and many others that have been recently opened with new information previously held in, not only your father’s possession, but openly in your family home …”
There are over fifty cases that he refers to. Fifty names that are now etched in stone lying in quiet graveyards.
This bar cannot be tainted with someone who worked so closely with so much injustice.
“This information that’s been brought to our attention and the formal complaint brought against you … it’s,” he says, then with an audible exhale, Malden finishes, “it’s alarming to say the least.”
“What you do today could affect your ability to defend yourself in these cases, Delilah,” Claire pleads with me once more, her eyes glossy and the corners of her thinning lips turned down.
“I didn’t—” I nearly defend myself, I nearly explain to her simply because she’s more than a boss and a friend, she’s someone who will need answers. It’s who she is; I should know because it’s who I used to be.
My shoulders rise as my lungs fill with a steadying breath. “I make no statement. I will not participate in the investigation and I have no desire to refute any complaints that have been brought forward.”
“Miss Jones, you have to know,” David Perry speaks. He’s another lawyer, older, the same age my father would be.
“I accept whatever decision the board makes.”
“She is not well,” Claire says once again, although she doesn’t rise from her seat and her fingers lace together in front of her.
All I can think, as the discussion continues without my voice being needed, is that I loved this. I loved all of this for so long. It’s yet another love that has turned to goodbye.
With their voices muted and my vision blurring, the crack of wood split with the hiss of a fire envelops me. The flames rage in the back of my mind, wild and untamed. A piece of my sanity whispers, it’s unethical as well. My passion is buried with the soot of what happened in the last months. My fervor is no longer logical, it is not black and white and line by line of precedence and rules. The burning need for justice is still there, not even buried beneath the surface, I feel it still and I doubt that will ever change.
Regardless of what these men and woman say today or tomorrow, I am not fit any longer, but not for any reason they could possibly imagine.
Maybe if they knew our story, all of it from every one of us, they’d realize I should have never been in a courtroom. I wasn’t meant for a life of what is right and wrong. My life was meant for one moment, one travesty that created a ripple of transgressions.
Cody
It’s not the worst thing in the world, I think to myself.
As if resigning is what’s on my mind. As if that’s what has me staring forward at a battered dartboard across the bar. The lively room is at odds with every emotion that’s dim and muted inside of me. This constant loss that seems to only hollow out more and more of me as the days wear on.
I have nothing left. That’s all I can think. Every piece of my world crumbled so quickly and without any chance at all of me stopping the wreckage. It was foolish for me to think I had any control at all or that I could keep up with the lies and sins.
With every tick of the clock, I accept my role and how I set the pieces into motion. I let each cog of the wheel turn, only watching as the time passed and the inevitable occurred.
There’s a rousing cheer from my left, a group of men happily clinking their bottles together in celebration of whatever just played on the televisions that line that wall.
At one point, I would pretend to share their sentiment, for no other reason than to blend in so I could continue to hide my secrets in plain sight.
Now, though, I seem to prefer fading. It feels … justified to say the least.
Ghosts of a glass filled with white wine and an easy laugh sit at the end of the bar where I first laid