Page 25 of The Wrong Side of the Law

“Oh, I see,” Emily says, every syllable sharp-edged. She rises from her chair, leaning against hands flat on my desk. “I suppose it’s my turn to apologize now, so here goes: I’m sorry. I’msosorry that nobody famous got caught breaking the law in this judicial district this week.”

Well, then. Somebody has forgotten her place in the food chain, it seems.

I resist the urge to stand up. I’d tower over her, and I don’t want to even hint at any kind of physical intimidation.

“Miss Wilson,” I say, using the harsh tones I usually reserve for a hostile witness. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to fire a government employee?”

The angry red drains from her face in half a heartbeat, replaced by a shocked and terrified pallor.

“I… I… n-no,” she stammers.

“Neither do I,” I say. “I’ve never had to fire anyone before. But so help me God, if you ever come to my office and pull this insolent crap with me again, we are both going to find out. Do I make myself clear?”

“Y-yes,” she says, blue eyes wide with shock.

“You can go back to your regular work, now,” I tell her, and spin my chair around to face my computer and reaching for the mouse to wake it up.

“I’m already off the clock,” Emily says in a small voice, quivering on the ragged edge of tears. “I’ve been off the clock for the past four hours.”

The lock screen finally shows up on my monitor, showing me scenery from some far-off ancient ruin, overlaid with a clock.

It’s almost twenty minutes past nine o’clock, and it’s a Friday night.

Emily has been working on my special request on her own time. Despite our unfortunate interaction the other day, she’s been putting her all into this job, and working off the clock to try and do everything that’s been asked of her.

I’m not the only one who’s tired and prickly.

By the time I turn back to her, Emily is already leaving my office. Her back and shoulders are stiff and straight, but although her hands are balled tightly into fists, her arms hang limp and boneless. The heels she’s wearing force her hips to sway inside the knee-length skirt, and—all unbidden and unwilling—the old joke jumps inappropriately into my head.

“I hate to see her go,” it says, “but boy, do I love to watch her walk away.”

God, Gabriel. Looking at her ass right now?You’rean ass. Completely and totally.

I’ve really screwed this up, utterly and completely, start to finish. I have to figure out some way to fix this, to apologize. But how the hell do I even start?

Send flowers and an apology to her tonight? Even if Human Resources would give me her address—and there’s no way they’d do that without explanations I’d rather not make—there’s nobody there in the office. Ditto for Lisa. There’s no way I want to talk to her about how much of a shit I’ve been to her protegee.

Flowers to her desk on Monday morning? Not a great idea, either. If the others in the paralegal cubicle farm talk about me the way she says, she’d be utterly radioactive with her coworkers if they thought I was doing her any favors.

A sincere and heartfelt apology, plus dinner? Yeah, right. Sure. You want to end up on television? That’s one sure-fire way to do it, and good luck pretesting your innocence when you just happened to ask your employee out right after threatening her job.

Image. Appearance.

Is this all that I am? Is there nothing more?

A wave of shame floods over me, and it only gets more suffocating when the ‘television case’ that Emily had brought to me comes back to mind. In her eyes, I’d been more concerned about the immediate personal implications of that case on myself than the way those children’s rights had been violated. I can see how she’d believe that I’d completely pushed those issues to the side, as soon as I was reasonably sure that the inevitable scandal wouldn’t splash any stink on me. That’s not me. That’s never been me.

Is this what I’ve become? More concerned about image and appearance than about the people around me? More concerned about how I’ll come off in front of a camera than about what’s right and just? Of course not. I’ll make sure that this gets taken care of. There’s no way I could do anything else, whether or not she understands that.

And yet, employee or not; image and appearance or not; crushing self-awareness or not… the fact remains: I still can’t get Emily Wilson out of my head.

I’m glad, now, that I didn’t try and apologize with dinner.

It has nothing to do with HR or reporters, and everything to do with the hurt and the anger I saw in Emily’s deep blue eyes. There’s no way that she’d accept the invitation, even if it was meant as an apology.

Hell, even I wouldn’t accept a dinner invitation from me right now.

I’ve got to fix that, and soon.

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