Small Great Things(102)

I wake up with my cheek pressed against the tile floor, and Micah standing over me. “Don’t look at me like that,” I say. “All smug because you’ve already been through this.”

“It gets better,” Micah promises.

I moan. “Wonderful.”

“I was going to make you breakfast in bed, but instead I opted for ginger ale.”

“You’re a prince.” I push myself upright. The room spins.

“Whoa. Steady, girl.” Micah crouches beside me, helping me to my feet. Then he sweeps me into his arms and carries me into the bedroom.

“In any other circumstance,” I say, “this would be very romantic.”

Micah laughs. “Rain check.”

“I’m trying really hard not to vomit on you.”

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that,” he says gravely, and he crosses his arms. “Would you like to have a fight now about how you’re not going into the office? Or do you want to finish your ginger ale first?”

“You’re using my tactics against me. That’s the kind of either-or I offer Violet—”

“See, and you think I never listen.”

“I’m going to work,” I say, and I try to get on my feet, but I black out. When I blink a moment later, Micah’s face is inches from mine. “I’m not going to work,” I whisper.

“Good answer. I already called Ava. She’s going to come over and play nurse.”

I groan. “Can’t you just kill me instead? I don’t think I can handle my mother. She thinks a shot of bourbon cures everything.”

“I’ll lock the liquor cabinet. You need anything else?”

“My briefcase?” I beg.

Micah knows better than to say no to that. As he goes downstairs to retrieve it, I prop myself up on pillows. I have too much to do to not be working, but my body doesn’t seem to be cooperating.

I drift off in the few minutes it takes Micah to come back into the bedroom. He’s trying to gently put the briefcase on the floor so he doesn’t disturb me, but I reach for it, overestimating my strength. The contents of the leather folio spill all over the bed and onto the floor, and Micah crouches to pick them up. “Huh,” he says, holding up a piece of paper. “What are you doing with a lab report?”

It’s wrinkled, having slipped between files to get wedged at the bottom of my bag. I have to squint, and then a run of graphs comes into focus. It’s the newborn screening results that I subpoenaed from the Mercy–West Haven Hospital, the ones that had been missing from Davis Bauer’s file. They came in this week, and given my lack of understanding of chemistry, I barely glanced at the charts, figuring I’d show them to Ruth sometime after her mother’s funeral. “It’s just some routine test,” I say.

“Apparently not,” Micah replies. “There’s abnormality in the blood work.”

I grab it out of his hand. “How do you know that?”

“Because,” Micah says, pointing to the cover letter I didn’t bother to read, “it says here there’s abnormality in the blood work.”

I scour the letter, addressed to Dr. Marlise Atkins. “Could it be fatal?”

“I have no idea.”

“You’re a doctor.”

“I study eyes, not enzymes.”

I look up at him. “What did you get me for our anniversary?”

“I was going to take you out to dinner,” Micah admits.

“Well,” I suggest, “take me to see a neonatologist instead.”

—

WHEN WE SAY, in America, that you have a right to be tried by a jury of your peers, we’re not exactly telling the truth. The pool of jurors is not as random as you’d think, thanks to careful scrutiny by the defense and the prosecution to eliminate both ends of the bell curve—the people most likely to vote against our clients’ best interests. We weed out the folks who believe that people are guilty until proven innocent, or who tell us they see dead people, or who hold grudges against the legal system because they were once arrested. But we also prune on a case-by-case basis. If my client is a draft dodger, I try to limit jurors who have proudly served. If my client is a drug addict, I don’t want a juror who lost a family member to an overdose. Everyone has prejudices. It’s my job to make sure that they work in favor of the person I’m representing.

So although I would never play the race card once the trial starts—as I’ve spent months explaining to Ruth—I’m damn well going to stack the odds before it begins.

Which is why, before we begin voir dire to choose jurors, I march into my boss’s office and tell him I was wrong. “I’m feeling a little overwhelmed after all,” I say to Harry. “I was thinking I might need a cochair.”

He takes a lollipop out of a jar he keeps on his desk. “Ed’s got a shaken-baby trial starting this week—”

“I wasn’t talking about Ed. I was thinking of Howard.”

“Howard.” He looks at me, baffled. “The kid who still brings his meals in a lunchbox?”

It’s true that Howard is fresh out of law school and that so far, in the few months he’s been at the office, has only done misdemeanors—domestics and a few disorderlies. I offer my smoothest grin. “Yeah. You know, he’ll just be an extra pair of hands for me. A runner. And in the meantime, it would be good for him to get trial experience.”