“Why not? Just because you dated years ago?”
“I can’t hire him because Ben beat me to it,” Grace said, lifting her eyes to meet her mother’s. “Yeah. Ben has already hired the best divorce lawyer in town. Face it, Mom. I’m screwed.”
“No, you’re not,” Rochelle said. “The Yellow Pages are full of divorce lawyers. You can’t swing a dead cat in this town without hitting a lawyer. We just need to find you the right one.” She drummed her fingers on the bar’s scarred wooden surface. A minute later, she disappeared into the kitchen.
When she reemerged, she handed her daughter a well-worn business card.
“Mitzi Stillwell, Attorney at Law?” Grace asked, lifting one eyebrow. “Who’s she?”
“A lawyer I know,” Rochelle said. “Give her a call.”
* * *
Mitzi Stillwell didn’t waste much time with niceties. She’d been practicing domestic law for a dozen years, and she generally believed her clients needed the truth more than they needed coddling.
She listened for fifteen minutes while Grace recounted her tale of what she now thought of as the meltdown, nodding and occasionally jotting some words onto a legal yellow pad.
“So,” Grace said, when she’d finished. “What do you think? Can you help me?”
Mitzi tapped the pen against the legal pad. “You walked away from your own home—even though your husband was the one screwing around on you?”
“Yes,” Grace said.
Mitzi cocked her head and a strand of gray-flecked dark hair fell across one eye. She was in her early fifties now, but when her hair started graying twenty years earlier, she’d chosen not to color it—just to give herself the look of an older, more experienced jurist. At home, she favored bright colors and clothes designed to show off the figure she worked hard at maintaining, but in the courtroom, Mitzi mostly chose expensively tailored business suits in neutral colors, with just enough feminine detailing to remind her clients—and prospective jurors—that she was a woman in charge.
“You know, Grace, it’s supposed to work the other way around. You’re supposed to kick his butt out of the house.”
“Sorry,” Grace said. “I’m new at all this. It never occurred to me to ask him to leave. Anyway, after I sank his car, I’d pretty much made the statement I needed to.”
Mitzi laughed. “I’ve handled hundreds of divorces over the years, but you’re my first client to drown a car.” She half stood and bowed in Grace’s direction. “Awesome. Although probably not prudent.”
She sat down again and looked at her notes. “How are you for money?”
“I’m broke,” Grace admitted. “Ben froze our bank accounts. He canceled my credit cards. I had to borrow money from my mom to buy gas to drive over here today.”
The lawyer nodded. “Nothing unusual about that. We’ll have to try to get the court to order your husband to come to a temporary financial agreement between the two of you.”
Mitzi doodled something on her legal pad, then considered whether or not to share some unhappy news with her client. She hesitated to pile more bad news on Grace Stanton, whose life had taken an ugly turn for the worse ever since she’d drowned her husband’s sports car two weeks earlier.
Grace caught the meaning of her lawyer’s pitying glance.
“What?” Grace said, tucking a lock of hair behind one ear. “You’re giving me that look.”
“What look?” Mitzi asked.
“It’s the look doctors give their patients before they tell them they’ve got an incurable disease. The look my college professor gave me right before he announced I’d pulled a D in statistics. The look that Ben gave me right before he admitted that night with J’Aimee wasn’t the first. Come on, Mitzi. Spit it out.”
Mitzi sighed. “Your divorce case has been assigned a judge, and we’ve got a date for an initial hearing.”
“But that’s good news, right? The faster we get things settled, the faster I can get my life back on track.”
“It would be good news,” Mitzi agreed. “Except that you drew Stackpole.”
“Who’s he? One of Ben’s old drinking buddies?”
“If only,” Mitzi said. “If we could prove he had some kind of association with your ex, that would be grounds for recusal, which would be great. But I doubt Ben and Cedric Stackpole have ever met.”
“Then, why is he bad news?”
“Because,” Mitzi said, “Cedric N. Stackpole Jr. is unofficial head of the He-Man Woman Hater Club.”
“Why?”
“Nobody knows. Stackpole just hates women in general and women plaintiffs specifically.”
“But, he’s a judge. I mean, judges are impartial, right?”
“Supposed to be,” Mitzi said. “Only Stackpole never got that memo. He’s a notorious misogynist. I’ve been lucky. I’ve only had one other divorce in front of him in the past.”
“How did that go?”
Mitzi’s eyes strayed to the row of framed diplomas on the wall opposite her desk. “Hmm? Don’t ask. My client got shafted. Her husband abandoned her and her two small children, left them basically penniless while he lived it up, funneling their marital assets into a dummy corporation. We had clear proof that he’d hidden assets, but Stackpole refused to hear a word of it. But because she finally had to go out and get a job to support herself and the children and eventually hooked up with a decent guy and allowed him to move in with her and the kids before the divorce was final, Stackpole decided she was an unfit mother. Gave the ex custody of the kids, forced her to move out of the house and sell it and split the proceeds with the ex, who was already a millionaire several times over.”
Mitzi shook her head at the memory. “The ex didn’t even want the kids. He just didn’t want to pay her child support. It was brutal.”
“How can a judge get away with that kind of thing?” Grace asked, horrified. “Can’t you report him or something?”
“That’s not how it works, unfortunately,” Mitzi said. “We’re just going to have to hope for the best. We’ll lay out the facts; Gracenotes is your business, carries
