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His grin belongs on those ambulance chaser posters Ruthie’s envisioned. Fake as fuck.
“Hi, sweetheart.”
I get up, because he’s practically humming with rage and nervous energy. He’s obviously not here to sit down and join us for a laidback brunch.
“I’ll be right back,” I tell my girls.
“We’re doing just fine,” Mira says.
I lead my friend to the private room, then stand back and to the side, watching as Shane stiffens his back and enters.
“Sorry I’m late,” he says, smooth as hell. “Got stuck in traffic on Patton.”
From the grim expressions of his partners, they know they’ve been called out, but they also know not to call him out in front of Lucas Burke Senior.
* * *
“I’m fucked,”Shane says, taking the whiskey I just poured for him and adding a good inch. We’re back at my apartment, sitting at the kitchen island. Mira went to a playground with Ruthie and Izzy—her suggestion, probably because she knows I don’t want my sister here, and I especially don’t want her here when I’m trying to have a serious talk with Shane.
“I take it your firm’s looking to defend the Burkes?” I ask my friend, because I can’t think of another reason for that meeting.
“They are,” he confirms. “Either I’m on board, or I’m out.”
“Did you tell them to go fuck themselves?” I ask, even though I can tell from his hangdog expression that he’s not sure what he’s going to do. I guess that’s why we’re here, just the two of us, and haven’t called in the other guys.
“No,” he says as he lowers his head into his hands.
“But you know they’re guilty. Doesn’t that automatically disqualify you from working with them?”
He snorts and gives me aDanny, you don’t know shitlook. “If being innocent were a prerequisite for working with us, we wouldn’t have very many clients. Everyone deserves good counsel. It’s one of the tenets of—”
“Burke is one of your best friends,” I interrupt, because I don’t need to hear a commercial for his law firm. Even if I find myself in dire need of legal help, I won’t be hiring them. Not now. “His parents are terrible people, and you know it. First hand.”
“I wouldn’t be working on the case directly.”
“You know what you have to do,” I say. Because he does. I can see it in his eyes. In the level of the whiskey in his glass. I can see it in the way he keeps twisting his tie even though it’s probably made of some expensive silk from hard-working worms.
If only knowing what to do made it easier to do it. I know from personal experience that it doesn’t. I didn’t want to work with Jarrod Travis. It was the last thing I wanted, lower on the list than prison, or at least on par with it. But sometimes the right answer is to pick the lesser of a lot of wrong ones.
Sometimes the right answer leaves you feeling like you’re all wrong, even if you’re the one who picked out and decorated the prison you put yourself in.
“It’s not that easy,” he says, his voice razor-edged. “You know how hard I’ve worked…”
“You have,” I agree. “But maybe it was never the right job. Maybe it was wrong from the start. You’re not like them. You’re not an asshole.”
He laughs without any humor. “Danny, sometimes you have to be an asshole to work among them.”
“You know what you need to do,” I say, because I believe it. I believe inhim. He may have strayed from the person he was—but he hasn’t left that boy behind entirely. He has a moral code. A compass that still knows true north even if he’s not ready to see and follow it.
“Fuck you, Danny. It’s easy for you to say, locked up here like you’re in some hermetically sealed box. You can be a vigilante from your computer, and it doesn’t cost you anything. It—”
“It could cost me everything,” I say quietly. “Maybe it already has.”
He swears, taps his hand against the kitchen island like he wishes it were someone’s face.
“Want a ceramic turkey?” I ask, apropos of nothing.
He understands, of course, and half his mouth lifts, the other staying determinedly down. “I shouldn’t be here right now. I’m not myself.”
