the building took on another transformation. A fragrant evergreen wreath with a red satin bow almost as wide as the door arrived from a grateful client in Oregon. Inside, the fire blazed; the birch logs from another grateful client somewhere in the state of Washington had arrived like clockwork the day before Thanksgiving.
It was a low-key firm; all the lawyers were friends, each of them helping the other. There was no shortage of clients, but that hadn’t always been the case. At one point the firm had struggled to keep its head above water, but that had all changed when the vigilantes were captured, then escaped. The media had had a field day as they splashed the news that the Quinn law firm’s owner was one of the infamous women. Within twenty-four hours, there had been long lines of women, some men, too, queuing outside to be represented by the now prestigious-cum-outrageous, famous law firm.
Nancy Barnes, the firm’s office manager, was fairly new to the firm. She’d replaced her aunt Maddy, who had retired to stop and smell the roses a year after the vigilantes had gone on the run. She knew the firm inside and out, having worked there summers and holidays for as long as she could remember. She herself was a paralegal but had found out that management was more to her liking. She had a wonderful rapport with the lawyers and clients. At Christmastime alone she had to have a friend come by with a pickup truck to take all her presents home, gifts from the lawyers, gifts from all the grateful clients.
Nancy Barnes loved her job.
On the first day of October, Nancy was huffing and puffing as she struggled with an oversize pumpkin that she had somehow managed to get into the lobby after opening the door and turning off the alarm without dropping the enormous squash. She knew by the end of the week there would be about twenty more pumpkins around her scarecrow-and-hay arrangement, brought in by the lawyers themselves, as well as the paralegals and secretaries.
Cozy. A feel-good place to come to when in trouble.
Nancy looked up to see a young woman coming through the door. Her first thought was that she looked like a deer caught in the headlights. Fragile. Scared. But there was a spark of something she couldn’t quite define. Yet.
Nancy Barnes was a chunky young woman who wore sensible shoes. She had curly hair, unruly curly hair, and a bridge of freckles that danced across her nose and rosy cheeks. She wore granny glasses and always had two or three pencils stuck behind her ears or in her hair. It was her smile that put new clients at ease, or maybe it was her first words of greeting; no one was ever quite sure.
“Good morning. What can I do to help you?”
“I’m Rachel Dawson, and I need to talk to a lawyer as soon as possible. I don’t have an appointment. I’m sorry. I just…what I did was…My husband doesn’t know I’m here. I can’t afford to be here.” The woman flapped her arms, then said, “But here I am.”
“I’ll tell you what. Walk around here to where I am. I’ll get us both some coffee, and you and I can talk. What that means is after you tell me your problem, I’ll decide who would work best with you. We have doughnuts, too.”
Rachel Dawson tried her best to smile but couldn’t bring it off. Nancy could see she was fighting back tears.
Settled at her desk, with coffee Rachel Dawson wasn’t going to drink, Nancy asked gently, “Tell me what you’re comfortable telling me so all of us here can help you. I want you to think of this firm as your extended family. Everyone here works for the client, and it doesn’t matter which attorney is assigned to you. Do you understand that?”
“I can’t afford to be here. My husband is going to be upset when he finds out I…”
“Let’s not talk about payment right now. But for the record, we do quite a bit of pro bono work. I’m usually the one who makes that particular decision, so we aren’t going to worry about whether you qualify or not right now. Tell me how we can help you.”
Rachel Dawson fooled Nancy. Before she spoke, she gulped at her coffee and drained the cup. “I can’t have children. It’s me, not my husband. I’ve had every test in the book. I’m thirty-seven. My husband is thirty-eight. We both have very good jobs, but right now I’m on a leave of absence. We were desperate to have a child, but the wait was so long, and going outside the country didn’t work for us. A friend of a friend told us about a lawyer who arranged adoptions. We went to see him a year or so ago, and in the end what we did…what my husband did was donate his sperm to a surrogate. It was all legal. We paid the lawyer a hundred thousand dollars. I don’t know how much of that went to the surrogate. We paid all her medical expenses. I even drove her to the doctor’s when she had to go. She was a student at George Washington University. We bought her clothes, food, and paid her rent.
“She gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. We were overjoyed. I can’t tell you how giddy we were. We went into panic mode the day we found out. We had to redo the house—you know, make room for two babies instead of one. I guess I should tell you we had to borrow forty thousand dollars from our parents. Call us foolish, but we’d been saving for a college fund even though we had no children. We hoped that we would eventually be blessed. We’re savers, Miss Barnes.”
Nancy watched Rachel peer into her cup. She seemed surprised that it was empty. So Nancy reached for the cup and went to the kitchen for a refill.
“We were so happy. It was like suddenly our life was now complete. We didn’t sleep. We sat up and watched the twins sleep. I guess all new parents do that. My husband took leave, too, for a month, so I could get things working. We couldn’t afford a nanny, and our parents helped out. We literally thought we’d died and gone to heaven.”
Rachel reached for the coffee and again drained the full cup. She set it down precisely where it had been. Nancy waited, knowing the worst was about to be revealed. She wasn’t wrong.
“Then our world turned upside down. A letter came in the mail from a lawyer saying his client, the surrogate mother, wanted the twins back. We thought about fighting back, but we had seen cases like this played out in the media, and the birth mother always got the children. Our parents offered to mortgage their houses. We were going to cash in our retirement funds and the college fund but were advised not to do that. My husband talked to several lawyers, and they basically told us to move on and put it behind us. I went to the lawyer we used to arrange the adoption. I called and called, and he didn’t call back. I went to his office, and they wouldn’t let me see him. I thought about going to the newspaper, but the truth was, I wasn’t strong enough mentally or physically for that kind of onslaught. You’ll find out sooner or later that I had a mini-breakdown. That’s what they called it, anyway.”
Nancy looked down at the small recording machine, which she’d decided to use at the last minute. As usual, she’d forgotten to mention it to this frail woman sitting in front of her. “Mrs. Dawson, I’m recording this conversation. I hope that’s okay. I should have told you that before I turned the machine on.”
“That’s okay. Is there anything you can do for me and Tom?”
Nancy’s mind raced. Was there? “I’m going to turn this off for a few moments. Then I’m going to get you some more coffee. I have to make a few phone calls. Will that be okay? I think I know just the person to help you.”
“Truly! You do! Oh, my God, I’ll do anything. Anything at all if you help me.”
“Which lawyer did you go to, to arrange the adoption?”
“Baron Bell.”
“Baron Bell?” The name shot out of Nancy’s mouth like a bullet. “Baron Bell
