Court Papers in the Locked Drawer of a Community Doctor
Across the road, the living room window of the Miller house was bright, but the curtains were pulled shut.
The dead silence of the neighborhood as my oldest friends turned their eyes away from my porch.
By nine o’clock the next morning, Karen’s conference room smelled of stale coffee and the sharp, chemical tang of the laser printer. The bright autumn light cut through the vertical blinds, throwing long stripes of white across the mahogany table. Karen sat opposite me, her yellow legal pad already half covered in her tight, vertical handwriting.
I did not touch the coffee she had poured for me. My fingers stayed near my collar, my thumb tracing the smooth edge of my silver wedding ring, feeling the small notch where I had caught it on a garden gate twenty years ago. I forced my hand down to my lap and kept it there.
“He chose the Blue Heron because the dining room is always full of his colleagues on a Saturday night,” I said, my voice sounding flat and dry in the quiet room. “He wants people he knows to see me struggle.”
