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see how this line of questioning is relevant to the proceedings at hand.”
    “I believe I can show relevance with my next question, Your Honor.”
    “Proceed.”
    “Is it true Adam Johnson has a restraining order out against you, Miss Fletcher?”
    “Objection.”
    “Overruled.”
    “Why did Adam Johnson take out a restraining order, Miss Fletcher?”
    The witness shakes her head, begins nervously chipping at the polish on the middle finger of her left hand. “Adam Johnson is a liar. He just wants to make trouble for me.”
    “I see. It has nothing to do with the fact you attacked him with a pair of scissors?”
    “They were just manicure scissors,” Caroline Fletcher protests weakly.
    “I have no more questions of this witness.” Amanda returns to her seat at the defense table and tries not to smile.
    The phone is ringing as Amanda walks by her secretary into her small office. “I’m not here,” she says in passing,closing the door behind her, and flipping through the stack of messages on her desk. She takes off her jacket, kicks off the black canvas pumps that have been pinching her toes all afternoon, and falls into her black leather chair. She’s tempted to stretch her legs across the top of her desk in triumph, the way men do in movies when they’re feeling especially smug, but it’s a little premature. The trial is far from over just because the prosecutor’s star witness delivered a less than stellar performance. There’s still the matter of those gruesome bite marks on Caroline Fletcher’s back. Will Derek Clemens really be able to persuade the jury to overlook the evidence of their own eyes?
    Another reason Amanda is reluctant to put her feet up: there’s no room. She needs more space. Her eyes skip from the blank computer screen in the middle of her desk to the various files and papers piled high along either side. Dozens of black, felt-tipped pens are strewn among a haphazard collection of paperweights and miniature pieces of crystal—a small poodle, an open book, a gold-plated quill in a tiny inkwell. Strange purchases for someone who normally disdains clutter, she thinks absently, looking toward the window of her third-floor office and wincing, as she always does, at the sight of the bright, bubble-gum-pink building across the street. Not that she is in any position to throw decorative stones, she decides, having failed in her attempt to persuade the powers that be at Beatty and Rowe to repaint their canary-yellow building a more palatable white.
    The door opens after a gentle knock, and Amanda’s secretary peeks her head inside. Underneath the shock of orange-red hair, Kelly Jamieson is vaguely cross-eyed, despite corrective surgery and heavy glasses. A long, thinnose sits in the middle of a moon-shaped face; her chest is flat; her legs are short and slightly bowed. Curiously, these flawed parts make for an oddly endearing whole. “That was Ben Myers again,” she announces, her voice crackling like logs in an open fire.
    Amanda lifts a file from her desk, pretends to be reading.
    “I told him you weren’t back from court yet. He left his home number, said you can phone him as late as you want.”
    Amanda drops the file to the desk, plays with the corner of another. “It’s late now,” she says. “Why don’t you call it a night?”
    Kelly hovers in the doorway. “Can I ask you a question?”
    Amanda lifts her eyes to her secretary, finds herself holding her breath.
    “Who is this guy?”
    Amanda conjures up half a dozen lies in the space of several seconds, abandons them just as fast. “He’s my ex-husband.”
    “Your ex-husband?” There’s no disguising the surprise in her secretary’s voice. Her eyes squeeze against the bridge of her nose. “I thought Sean Travis was your ex-husband.”
    “Him too.”
    “You have two ex-husbands?”
    Amanda hears the silent addendum—
And you’re only twenty-eight!
    “What can I say? I’m a very good lawyer and a very bad