The Last Invitation (11)
A few more minutes of uncomfortable shifting and stifled conversation with the other mourners, and Jessa broke free. She gulped in hot air as she stepped outside and into the sunshine.
“Did Baines leave an unpaid legal bill? If so, you can scurry along because I’m not paying it.”
Jessa recognized the sarcastic slap of a voice before she turned around. She skipped the pleasantries and any fake attempts to pretend they didn’t know each other. “Gabby, I’m truly sorry for your loss.”
“How publicly decent of you.”
Jessa had expected a chill. This was more like an ice storm.
“Are we friends again?” Gabby asked.
Were they ever really friends? Law school classmates years ago at George Washington. People who knew some of the same people. Not close, and that distance widened when Jessa’s firm took on Gabby’s ex, the deceased Baines, as a client in his divorce.
Gabby had fought her then-husband’s choice in representation, insisting there was a conflict. At first, she claimed Baines had purposely met with most of the best family lawyers in the metro area to conflict them out and keep Gabby from retaining them. She wasn’t wrong. Baines, like many other people in the middle of a contentious divorce proceedings, had deployed that strategy, and the court had let him do it. When Gabby then argued that the law school connection to Jessa conflicted out Covington and the entire firm from representing Baines, she lost. Again.
Jessa tried to find the right words to cut through the mess piled between them and realized there weren’t any. “I know the divorce was—”
“Save it.” Gabby leaned in. “You’ve done your duty and played the good soldier. You can leave now.”
Before Jessa could respond, Covington popped up by her side. “Ms. Fielding, I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Yeah, I got the office memo.”
He frowned. “Excuse me?”
The daughter joined them. “Mom?”
Jessa hadn’t been an official part of the divorce case team because that was the promise the firm had made to the court to overcome Gabby’s objection to the firm remaining on the case for Baines, but Jessa knew this was Kennedy. The divorce of wealthy, powerful people drew attention, and the Fieldings landed in that category.
“There are the lawyers who represented your dad in the divorce,” Gabby told her daughter.
Kennedy’s sniffling and teary-eyed look disappeared. “Should you be here?”
“They’re leaving.” Gabby handed Kennedy off to her uncle and watched Covington wander away. Her full attention centered on Jessa. “You can take your bullshit concern and go home.”
Jessa didn’t want to fight. She didn’t want a scene or any sort of confrontation. Her being there amounted to an uncomfortable obligation and nothing more. Even without working on the case, Jessa knew Gabby got screwed by a system run mostly by men who played golf together. The rules applied to her but were loosened for her ex so he could have the attorney he wanted—Covington, a man who treated divorce cases as open warfare without any emotion.
There was no way to repair even the limited relationship she’d had with Gabby before and make things easier for the friends they still shared. So Jessa stood there and took it. Part of her thought she owed that much to Gabby. Jessa had made some serious mistakes in the past . . . and Gabby was one of the people who knew that.
“How do you sleep at night?” Gabby asked.
Jessa got the question a lot. How could you represent that guy or that horrible woman? Don’t you care about the kids, the alimony, if I can eat? It was a part of the job she could barely tolerate.
But she did have a limit. Gabby might never have practiced law, but she’d gone to law school. She understood the concept of zealous representation even if she was pretending not to.
“I sleep fine.”
Gabby snorted. “Yeah, of course you do.”
Chapter Twelve
Gabby
Seeing Jessa put Gabby in a terrible mood. The slim redhead had a way of making everything worse.
The grumbling in Gabby’s head still lingered an hour later at the gravesite ceremony. The emotions ping-ponging inside her for more than a week stopped bouncing around and settled on hate. Heat had flooded through her as she watched Jessa climb into her boss’s fancy sedan and simmered even now.
Maybe she should be grateful to feel something other than confusion. Baines being gone had left a huge gaping hole in her life and in Kennedy’s. The end to the marriage had been terrible, but the years before came with a sprinkling of humor and good times. They’d built this life together, and she still couldn’t believe how quickly it had crumbled under her.
Her emotions bounced all over the place. None of them rose to the level of true grief, of weeping in pain over his loss, because she wouldn’t let herself think of anything but the questions about his death.
That probably explained why she’d become fixated on the man who lingered in the back of the church during the reception before the service. The same man who followed them to the private gravesite ceremony and stood away from the crowd now.
Any other time she would have ignored him. He probably wouldn’t have registered at all, but she was on edge. Every noise and movement caught her eye and dragged her mind away from the finality of the day. The stranger wore jeans and a blazer, a bit too casual and not what she’d expect from one of Baines’s business associates. His face didn’t look familiar at all.