with you when you go talk to him.”
“Greg, you don’t…”
“I’m going with you.”
The meeting took only two phone calls to set up, well, three if she counted the one to tell Greg about it. By three o’clock the next afternoon, they were being ushered into Mitchell Conrad’s rather small, cramped office. Clearly he wasn’t into impressing anybody.
“Taylor,” Mitchell said, standing from behind his desk. He put out his hand to her over the stacks of papers and books there. “And Greg. Good to see you, man.”
“Good to see you, too,” Greg said, shaking Mitchell’s hand.
“Please, please, have a seat.” Mitchell moved two stacks of things and relocated them to the top of the filing cabinet behind his desk.
Sitting carefully, Taylor waited until the receptionist closed the door and Mitchell came back. Even then, she wasn’t completely sure where or how to start.
“I take it Lily talked to you,” Mitchell finally said when neither of them said anything.
Taylor nodded, her much more fashionable braid for today slid up and down her shoulder when she did. “We’re just…” She glanced at Greg who was looking only at her with those eyes that said he would do whatever she needed him to. “Uhm, the trial for the case is next week. We’ve already done the deposition, and well… I mean, I’m not real… I haven’t had a lot of experience with that kind of thing, but Chris’s lawyers were…”
“Snakes,” Greg bit out when she didn’t continue. Taylor looked at him in surprise. “What? They were.”
“Okay,” Mitchell said, and he stopped for a second. “Do you mind if I take notes?”
“Uh, n-no,” Taylor stumbled. “But… I’m not sure…”
“It’s okay,” Mitchell said. “First consult is on the house until we figure out what you might need or want to do beyond that.”
The breath felt good, and she looked at Greg once again before she nodded. “They weren’t very nice or very ethical for that matter.”
“Okay, how so?” Mitchell asked.
This look to Greg was more for courage than permission. Slowly, he nodded as if to say he believed it to be safe.
“I…” Taylor started, and her gaze fell to her hands.
“Taylor,” Mitchell said gently. “Anything you say in here is confidential. No one else will ever know, not even Lily.”
Nodding, Taylor tried to get herself to continue, but the words were lost in the swirl of emotions and images just thinking about them had brought up. Tears stung their way to the surface, and she shook her head to keep them from pouring out of her. How could there still be so many?
“Well, for one thing,” Greg finally said, “they tried to make it sound like she was sleeping around.”
“With you?” Mitchell asked without a hint of judgment or emotion.
“With everyone. Me, Nelson, Hayden.”
Taylor grimaced at that as her battle with the tears finally gained more ground than it lost. She sniffed the emotion back and swiped at her eyes.
Mitchell nodded gravely. “Okay. Tell you what, if you don’t mind, why don’t we start from the beginning? Hang on.” He leaned forward and pushed a button on the phone. “Denise, hold all my calls and clear my schedule for the rest of the afternoon please.”
Before Taylor could think to stop him, the phone beeped back.
“Yes, Sir, Mr. Conrad.”
“Now,” Mitchell said, sitting forward over his legal pad, “let’s go through this from the beginning, and don’t leave anything out.”
Greg wasn’t sure he would have been able to recount all of the gory details with the grace Taylor did. With only a few glitches to regather herself, she walked Mitchell through all of it. Meeting Chris at the party, being intimate with him almost before she knew his name. The second meeting at the bar when she was out with the sorority sisters. Every detail made him want to cringe, but he held it all in check. The last thing she needed was for him to fall apart.
“He said they were just for him,” she said of the pictures Chris had taken of her at the apartment after he moved in. “I didn’t think…” Her head dropped as she closed her eyes. It took another breath to get her going again. “I wanted to believe him,” she said, her voice going hollow. “He said he loved me, and I wanted to believe him.”
Mitchell nodded. “Okay.”
“I’m not sure when it all started getting physical,” Taylor said. “At first, it was all just weird stuff, like he’d move things, and when I’d ask about them, he’d say I should keep