Authors: Hannah Ford
He opened the door all the way and I stepped
inside.
Clementine was sitting in
the chair in front of Noah’s desk, her legs crossed in front of her, her
posture relaxed and confident, like she owned the place.
She was wearing a sleeveless white dress
that hit just above her knee, with a narrow black belt that emphasized her tiny
waist.
“Hello, Charlotte,” she said when she saw
me.
“Noah and I were just going
over the particulars for the new office space.
It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Beautiful.”
She gathered up her papers,
then
slid out of the office.
She tapped
Noah on the chest with the sheaf of papers as she walked by.
“Fax the signatures when you have them.”
“Will do.”
Once the door closed behind her, I turned to
Noah.
“What was she doing here?” I asked.
I was trying to keep my voice light, but
I could hear the jealousy laced underneath it.
Stop it, Charlotte,
I told
myself.
There is nothing to get
upset about.
“She was getting me the final paperwork for the
new space.”
“What does she have to do with it?”
“I didn’t mention that I’m leasing it from
her?”
He said it so nonchalantly,
without a care in the world.
“I thought you bought it.
For us.”
“I did buy it.
I am buying it.
But buying a property takes time,
Charlotte.
So I’m leasing it for
the first month, after which time it will be mine.”
“Ours,” I said softly.
“What?”
“It will be ours,” I said.
“Yes.”
He looked at me.
“Clementine
is not a threat to you, Charlotte.”
“Who said I was threatened by her?”
“Your behavior is indicative of someone who
feels threatened.”
“I’m not threatened,” I said.
“I just wish you had told me, that’s
all.”
“It wasn’t important.”
“It wasn’t important to
you,”
I countered.
His phone rang then, and he crossed the room
and answered it, even though we were in the middle of a discussion.
“Cutler,” he barked into the phone.
“Who?
Yes, put him through.”
His eyes flicked up to me, his jaw tightening,
almost if whoever was on the other end of the phone had something to do with
me.
But who could be calling Noah
about me?
“Yes,” he said as he listened. “
Yes…..yes
… I understand.
I assume it will be taken care of
immediately?
Thank you.”
He hung up the phone.
He stayed silent for a moment, then leaned over
his desk and gripped the edge, his knuckles turning white.
A cold sliver of icy fear slid up my
spine, a premonition that I wasn’t going to like whatever he was about to say.
“Where are they?” he demanded.
“What?”
“The letters,” he said.
“Where are they?”
“What letters?”
“Dammit, Charlotte,” he said, slamming his fist
down on the desk, his eyes blazing with fury.
“What the
hell
were you
thinking?”
“What the hell was I thinking about what?”
“About getting letters from Colin Worthington
and not telling me?”
My stomach flipped like a pancake onto a hot
griddle, sizzling with anxiety.
“That’s what I came here to tell you.”
“How long?” he demanded.
I swallowed and averted my eyes from his.
“The first one came two weeks ago.”
“Two weeks ago?” he raged.
“Jesus, Charlotte, you have no idea what
kind of position you are putting yourself in.”
“Yes, I do,” I said.
“That’s why I came here.
I wanted to tell you.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you want to tell me?”
“So you could help me!”
“Help you what, Charlotte?”
“Help me to stop them,” I said, but even as I
was saying the words, I wasn’t sure they were true.
“You could have stopped them yourself,” Noah
said, a vein in his forehead throbbing.
“You didn’t need me for that.
You could have called the warden, you could have called the jail and
told them you didn’t want to receive letters from him anymore.
And yet you didn’t.
Why didn’t you do that, Charlotte?”
The room was starting to swim, and I took a seat
in the chair Clementine had just vacated.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know?”
He was right, of course.
I could have stopped the letters. It would have
taken two seconds to make a call to the jail.
They would have put me on Professor
Worthington’s do not contact list.
No prison was going to let an inmate have unwanted contact with one of
his victims.
So then why hadn’t I
done it?
“Noah,” I said slowly, trying to form my
jumbled thoughts into a coherent sentence.
“Do you think it’s weird that I haven’t been back to school?”
“What?” he asked, seemingly thrown by the
change in
topic.
“No, I don’t think it’s weird, Charlotte.
You have been through an extreme trauma.”
“But two weeks.”
I shook my head.
“I’m slipping behind.
It might be impossible to catch up.”
“I’ll call them,” he said.
“I’ll talk to them.”
My hands tightened around the arms of the chair
I was sitting in.
“No,” I
said.
“No, I don’t want you to call
them.
I don’t want you to make a call
and fix everything, Noah.”
“Then what do you want, Charlotte?”
“I want you to talk to me!”
“I am talking to you!”
“No, I want to be able to talk to you about
what happened at Force.”
I twisted
my hands in my lap. “There was a girl there, Noah.
She needed my help.
I can’t just forget about her.”
“This again,” Noah said, shaking his head.
“Charlotte, you told the police about
her.
You did everything you
could.
She is not your
responsibility.”
“Yes,” I said.
“She is.
She needed help and – ”
“Stop saying that!”
He crossed the room to where I was and sat
down in the chair across from me, pulled me forward so that we were facing each
other.
He grabbed me around the
waist and slid me down the chair toward him until our legs were touching.
He leaned forward and took my face in his
hands.
“She is not your
responsibility.
But you
are
my
responsibility.
I won’t let
anything happen to you, Charlotte.
I will protect you this time, no matter what the cost.
If that means you getting angry with me
because I am going to stop you from doing certain things, well, then, so be it.”
“This time?” I asked.
He looked away, but I could see the pain on his
face.
“Is that what you think?” I pressed.
“That you didn’t protect me?”
I shook my head.
“You
did
protect me, Noah.
If it weren’t for you, I would be dead.
But I need to be able to talk about
things,
I need to
be able to process them.
I need to
be able to figure out exactly what it was that happened.”
“I’m doing the god damn best I can!”
“Well, I need more,” I said, the words slipping
past my lips before I could stop them.
“I don’t know if I have more to give,” he said
softly.
I opened my mouth to speak.
But then I realized there was nothing left to
say.
I couldn’t believe that after all of this,
after all of the strides we’d made, how close I’d felt to him, that we were
right back here, in the exact same place we always ended up.
I got up and walked out.
He didn’t try to stop me.
***
I kept walking.
I walked and walked and walked, turning down
random streets and weaving my way through the city.
I had no idea where I was going.
I walked for two hours.
Noah didn’t try to call me, didn’t try to text
me.
I didn’t cry, or feel anger toward him.
All I felt was numb.
I was on the subway to the Bronx before I
realized where exactly
,
it was I was going
.
I needed to go and see him.
I needed to go and see Professor
Worthington.
I needed some answers.
***
The jail was surprisingly easy to get
into.
I’d heard horror stories
about people not being allowed in, about families being turned away at gates by
surly guards while children cried and begged to see their mothers or fathers.
I was lucky enough to have shown up during
visiting hours, even luckier that I’d been added to Professor Worthington’s
visitor list.
He’d listed me as his
lawyer,
which
was probably the only reason I’d even
been allowed to be added, but I wasn’t going to ask questions.
A uniformed officer led me into a tiny holding
room, with a partition of glass that separated the prisoners from their visitors.
The room was private, with only one
chair.
It was disconcerting.
I’d been expecting lots of other people to be
here talking to their loved ones, had been hoping for soft voices that drifted
through the room and blunted the force of whatever it was that was about to
happen.
I wanted to ask if there was another room, a
busier one, but I didn’t want to give away the fact that I might not really be Professor
Worthington’s lawyer.
After all,
wouldn’t a lawyer welcome the chance to be alone with her client? I couldn’t
risk getting kicked out.
I sat down on my side of the partition and
pulled a tiny notebook out of my bag, set my cell phone down on the ledge in
front of me.
They hadn’t taken it
from me,
which
I’d found odd, but perhaps they didn’t
do that for lawyers.
The room was hot, muggy, the air heavy.
I could feel a tiny bit of sweat
starting at the curve of my back.
It seemed to take forever for them to bring him
in.
When he finally appeared
he
was flanked by two guards, handcuffed, and wearing a dull grey prison jumpsuit
.
His hair had been freshly washed, but his face
was drawn.
A huge bandage covered
one of his eyes.
He sat down across from me, and the guards left
the room, the heavy door shutting with an audible click behind them.
I resisted the urge to scream after
them, to insist they come back and protect me.
From what, I wasn’t sure.
There was a
plexi
glass partition between
me and the professor,
and a
camera attached to the ceiling blinked a red light, alerting us to the fact
that someone was always watching.
It’s just practice
, I told myself.
If you’re going to be a defense
lawyer someday, you’re going to have to get used to coming to prison and
talking to your clients.
“Charlotte,” the professor said, and the sound
of his voice filled me with the urge to wretch.
“Professor,” I said, nodding.
He smiled.
“I knew you’d come.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Why?”