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petite and shapely, on the surface a real feminina , but she could always drink me under the table, and when you got her going, she could cuss like a truck driver.
    After everything happened with Talia and Emily, and I quit my law firm and spent almost three months holed up in my house, Shauna cajoled me into renting space from her and hanging a shingle of my own. I thought of putting ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK on that sign but settled on LAW OFFICES OF JASON KOLARICH.
    “Hey.” Shauna had her feet up on the long walnut desk, reading over some complicated transaction. Shauna still did trial work but when she’d left her law firm, she took with her a client that shoots her transactional work, too. When you’re a solo practitioner, you become a jack-of-all-trades, and Shauna was a fast learner. “Get any sleep, dear?”
    I hadn’t exactly been keeping regular hours lately. Many of those nights had been spent out with Pete, who seemed to have boundless energy when it came to bars and women. Occasionally, Shauna would hang out with me, too, which was a different kind of sport because I got to watch a lot of sloppy-drunk idiots make a play for her.
    “Smitty and Dom want to grab lunch today,” she told me, not even looking up from her case file. “Wanna come?”
    Her request was deliberately casual. She didn’t know, specifically, how I spent my lunches but probably had a good idea. She’d been trying to pull me out of my funk for the past four months. Still, she hadn’t pushed, and she wasn’t pushing now.
    “Can’t do it, m’lady,” I told her.
    She looked up, training those loving but disapproving blue eyes on me for only a moment before looking back into her file. She hasn’t known how to handle this thing with me. I was a train wreck there for a while, holed up in my house, feeling sorry for myself, and the best she could figure was that it was better for her to be around than not. She probably understands me better than anyone I know, so she knows that I’m a loner at heart.
    “Marie said something about a murder case?”
    “Trial starts in four weeks.”
    “Oh, well—four whole weeks.” That’s what I like about Shauna. She doesn’t get emotional about very many things. Even when that senior partner started sexually harassing her at her old firm, she simply responded with a counteroffer: She’d contact the EEOC, and his wife, if he didn’t give her a generous severance package and let her steal a client or two. “How’d that come about?”
    I told her the name of my client.
    “Sammy Cutler?” The name wasn’t registering with her, but she knew it should. “Sammy—” Her feet came off the table. “From BonBons?” she asked, meaning Bonaventure High School. “That freaky guy who wore the army jackets and got stoned all the time?”
    Her reaction made me feel worse than I already did, only highlighting the divide that grew between Sammy and me after I became a jock. Shauna didn’t even know that Sammy and I had been friends. It was a painful and embarrassing reminder of how much distance I had put between us once I became a member of the high school elite, a varsity athlete in my sophomore year.
    “Sammy was my guy growing up,” I said, allowing enough tone in my voice to call for a little respect on this topic. Shauna grew up about two miles away from Sammy and me, which to us was a different neighborhood altogether, a middle-class area that also fed into BonBons. “My next-door neighbor.”
    “And he killed someone?”
    Sammy hadn’t come out and confessed to me, but I certainly assumed so. “He killed the guy who killed his sister,” I said, which of course forced me to unload the entire story on her. Shauna, like me, would have been seven years old when it happened, and she might have heard something about it—no doubt her parents did—but it wouldn’t have registered in the way it did with me, naturally.
    After listening to all of this, she exhaled dramatically. “Well, Mr.