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up in surprise.
    â€œWhat happened?” she asked. “I didn’t expect to see you until after the jury went home for the night.”
    Alexia responded with a small, triumphant smile. “We settled it. Marilyn is set for life.”
    â€œCongratulations!”
    â€œThanks. It felt good. Up to the last minute, I wondered if Greg Simpson had an escape hatch, but he was busted in open court. Do you have time to type the settlement documents if I dictate them this afternoon?”
    Gwen pointed a ring-bedecked finger toward Leonard Mitchell’s office. “L. M. loaded me down with paperwork for a deal he’s trying to put together. I don’t know when he needs it, but he acted like it was a rush job. Do you want me to talk to him?”
    â€œNo,” Alexia responded.
    Alexia often faced resistance when she asked the partner to set aside his work so Gwen could help her on an urgent matter.
    â€œIt will be easier to do it myself.”
    Alexia went into her office and shut the door. The exposé of Greg Simpson’s hidden business dealings had been one of the more dramatic triumphs of her career. It wouldn’t be reported in the local newspaper, but by the end of the week the legal community would be buzzing with the result. Simpson was a sleazy cheat, but it’s rarely possible to neatly unravel a web of deception. Alexia didn’t have a complete picture of Simpson’s involvement with KalGo, but after the exposure of the Nesbitt deal, Byron Smith wasn’t willing to call her bluff. The questions in court were routine; the hard work had been the behind-the-scenes investigation.
    Alexia had personalized her office with items collected from all over the world. It was like a mini-museum. On one end of her credenza crouched a primitive sculpture of a roaring lion she’d bought in Tanzania. On the other end rested a hand-painted tray from the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. An intricate tapestry from Greece adorned one wall, and a collage of photographs of Alexia in front of famous buildings across Europe decorated another. Most of her early travels were with her mother. Lately, she’d been sojourning on her own. After the hectic pace of life at the office, she longed for times of prolonged solitude.
    For more than a year, a picture of her former fiancé, Jason Favreau, had occupied the place of highest prominence on the front corner of her desk. Jason, a tall, dark-haired engineer, shared enough common denominators with Alexia that most computer dating services would have predicted a storybook romance. Both had international pedigrees: Alexia’s mother was a Russian who defected to the United States in the 1960s and married a man from Ohio, while Jason’s father was a Frenchman who married a woman from California. Jason was fluent in French, and Alexia spoke passable Russian. They both loved to travel, read, swim, and listen to classical music.
    Shortly after their engagement, Jason went to Marseille to supervise a large construction project. Ten weeks passed with excruciating slowness until Alexia was scheduled to fly over for a five-day visit. The night before she was to leave, Jason called and told her not to come. One of his father’s cousins had introduced him to a French girl, and they were in love. Two months later, they married and moved to Quebec.
    After her tears dried, Alexia tore up Jason’s picture and scattered the pieces in the ocean, but a measure of pain remained. Having experienced betrayal and misplaced trust, her empathy for her jilted clients increased, and she poured herself more fiercely into her work. Her daily diet of divorce work soured Alexia’s taste for romantic relationships, and her mother was worried that she’d be an old maid. Alexia deflected her comments with statements that she was too busy for men and needed time to forget what had happened. In any event, the sampling of suitable men in Santee for a woman like