Page 14 of His Verdict
Interim suspension.The words float in front of my eyes. My license. The physical manifestation of my life, of sleepless nights studying for the bar, wanting nothing more than to change the world for the better, is gone. Stripped from me by a single piece of paper. Just like that. I am no longer Olivia Sutton, Esquire. I am just Olivia Sutton. Unemployed. Unemployable. Disgraced.
All that I have left is my student loans.
A wave of pure, white-hot fury surges through me. Fury at Jasper for his monstrous, meticulous cruelty. And a deeper, sicker fury at myself. For being so weak. So cheap. So desperate that I walked right into his fucking trap.
“No,” I say again, this time out loud. The sound is ragged. I get to my feet, a new, frantic energy coursing through me. I will not let him win. There has to be another way.
I storm over to my laptop and throw it open. My fingers fly across the keyboard, my legal mind kicking into survival mode, searching for a loophole, an escape clause.
A new state. That’s it.
I can pack my bags, move to Oregon or Colorado, somewhere I can disappear. I’ll take the bar exam there. Startfresh. It will be hard, a nightmare of logistics and more debt, but it’s a path. A way to rebuild a life from the ashes of this one. Hope, thin and fragile, flickers in my chest.
I start researching, my heart hammering with a desperate optimism.
My search terms are frantic:
Applying for bar admission with pending disciplinary action.
Interstate attorney discipline reciprocity.
Can I practice law in another state if my license is suspended?
The answers come back, not as opinions or articles, but as cold, hard rules. A series of digital body blows, each one knocking more air from my lungs.
Disclosure is Mandatory.
Applications are Halted.
Reciprocal Discipline.
I stare at the screen, the text blurring through a film of tears. The flicker of hope dies, snuffed out by the cold, impartial machinery of the law. The system I devoted my life to has become my prison. There is no escape. I am branded. My career didn't just end in one city; it ended in all of them.
The trap wasn’t just the job offer. The trap is the system itself. He knew. Jasper knew all of this. He didn’t just corner me; he checkmated me on a national scale.
The next few days are a gray, timeless smear. My apartment becomes a tomb. I don’t answer the phone. I don’t check my email. The world outside ceases to exist. I amsuspended in a limbo of my own making, haunted by the ghost of the woman I used to be and the monster who made me this way.
His presence becomes a kind of psychosis.
I start seeing him everywhere. When I force myself to go to the corner store for milk, I see a tall man in a dark, well-tailored suit standing across the street, watching my building. When I look again, he’s gone. A black sedan with tinted windows is parked on my block for an hour; I watch from behind my curtains, my heart pounding, until it finally drives away. Am I being watched? Or is my guilt so profound it’s manifesting shadows?
He’s in my head, a constant, invasive presence. I hear his voice, replaying his arguments from the lounge. He’s a virus in my thoughts, twisting my logic, seducing my ambition. I lie in bed at night, and I can almost feel the phantom weight of his gaze on me, assessing me, waiting for me to break. My obsession shifts from the case to the man himself. Who is he? What does he want with me?
On the fourth day, I finally hit bottom. I’m out of clean clothes, there’s no food in the fridge, and the despair is a physical weight pressing down on my chest, making it hard to breathe. I can’t live like this. I can’t live in this silent, paranoid tomb he’s built for me. I have to dosomething.
My eyes land on the leather folio on the coffee table. It’s the source of all of this. The contract. The check. The first link in the chain that has now been wrapped around my throat.
I can’t accept his offer. I won’t. My pride, what little I have left, rebels at the thought of working for the man who destroyedme. But I can’t just leave it here, a constant reminder of my failure.
With a final surge of defiance, I grab the folio. I’m going to throw it away. All of it. The contract, the blood money. It’s a small, symbolic gesture, but it’s mine. An act of rebellion.
I carry it to the trash can in the kitchen. I open the folio one last time, my fingers brushing against the creamy, expensive paper of the contract. I pull it out, ready to rip it to shreds.
As I do, a small, thick card that was tucked inside flutters to the floor.
It’s not the handwritten note. It’s something else. An embossed business card, heavy and black. There’s no name on it. No company. No phone number.
Just a single line of stark, silver lettering. An address.