Chapter Text
Han's text read:
Lunch Saturday. Noon. Don't bring anything.
Rey brought donuts anyway, because sixteen years of Han Solo had taught her that he would take the box, grunt, and eat four.
His house sat at the end of a road in Half Moon Bay that gave up halfway through being a road. It was the second week of July, which on that coast meant fifty-seven degrees and a gray sky. Fog came off the water in wafts. She parked her Corolla behind his old truck and rang the bell.
Inside, Chewie lost his mind.
It took Han a minute. She heard him tell the dog to move, twice, and then the deadbolt, and then the door opened to the smell of lunch, coffee, old wood and, and faintly underneath all that, wet dog.
"Hey kid."
Rey got two steps down the entrance hall before eighty pounds of chocolate brown goldendoodle came around the corner at speed, took the turn badly on the floorboards, and arrived at her shins.
"Chewie."
Chewie sat. Chewie looked at the donut box.
"No."
Chewie looked at the donut box harder.
"He can open the fridge," Han said, heading back to the kitchen. "Did I tell you that? He's figured out the handle. I've got a bungee cord on my own refrigerator like a lunatic."
"You should be proud."
He took the donut box, frowned at it, and set it on top of the fridge where Chewie could see it and not reach it.
"I should have gotten a Labrador."
Han poured her a cup of drip coffee sitting on the warmer before returning to the stove. There was a pan of ground beef going with onion and garlic, a pot of water sitting on a burner that was on low simmer, and two jars of Classico tomato and basil on the counter with the lids already off. Rey pulled out a stool and let him work. They talked about his recent work on his boat. They talked about the Sanchez case. They talked about the new judge in Department 21 who ran her calendar like a woman trying to make a flight.
Han didn't start the pasta and kept looking at the clock over the stove.
Rey spoke up when Han pulled the beef off the heat completely. “Are you waiting for someone?"
Chewie exploded off the floor. The doorbell rang.
"You got me," Han said, turning the burner under the pot of water all the way up, "There's someone I want you to meet."
He went for the door and returned with a visitor wearing a suit that was probably equivalent to her monthly rent. On a Saturday. In July. In Half Moon Bay.
The stranger's looks were, technically, all there. Broad shoulders, tall. Dark eyes, thick hair just meeting his collar, a jaw that photographed well. But that was where her good opinion stopped, because she knew this man's type. He was the grown version of the kid who used to sit in the second row at arraignments in a jacket that matched his lawyer's, scrolling on a phone while his father wrote the check that made the whole morning go away. One of them had called her doll in a courthouse hallway last spring, surrounded by his team, on his way to a plea deal he did not deserve.
For the life of her she couldn't work out why Han, a retired public defender, of all people, had someone like that standing in his kitchen.
"Rey," Han said on his way back to the stove. "My son. Ben Solo."
Oh. Oh.
“Ms. Jones.”
They shook hands. Now that she knew to look, she could see the resemblance between him and Han around the mouth and in the shape of his eyes. Han mentioned his son every six months or so, always briefly, always with a hint of wistfulness, but clearly with love. This was him. She recalibrated her opinion in his favor.
Until Ben Solo looked at her.
His eyes went to her face, then to her oversized sweater, her jeans, then to the boots she'd bought off a sale rack, then back. The whole circuit took under two seconds and still managed to feel like an examination. Earnings bracket, education, importance. She watched him judge her, and her opinion reverted.
He caught himself.
Whatever he'd been about to say, he shelved, and his expression rearranged itself into something warmer in the time it took him to blink. His eyes softened. The mouth tilted up at the corners. He looked almost benign.
"I made you uncomfortable. Apologies." A small, practiced smile. "Dad talks about you. You look just like your graduation photo, by the way. He keeps it on the fridge."
The showmanship was somehow worse than the scanning. She turned. "Han. Explain, or I'm going."
The water picked that moment to boil. Han tore open the pasta, dumped it in, gave it one stir, before finally turning back around. He even had the decency to look a little sheepish about it.
"So." He rubbed the back of his neck. "He's got a proposal for you. I told him it was the dumbest plan I'd ever heard." He looked at Ben, and Ben looked back at him. Something wordless passed between them. "He asked me to introduce you anyway. That's on me. Look, you don't have to say yes. Just hear him out once. Please."
Han said please. Han never said please. So Rey sat down against her better judgement.
“Drop the act and get on with it,” she told the son.
The practice smile got dialed down by a degree but didn't fully disappear. He took out a single sheet of paper from his leather bag, double-sided, and slid it across the table. On top of it, squared to the corner, he laid a business card.
BENJAMIN SOLO
Partner, Technology Transactions & M&A
Pestage & Amedda LLP
One Market Plaza, 39th Floor, San Francisco
Rey read Partner twice before she said anything, because Pestage & Amedda was an elite litigation powerhouse that had four floors of One Market and offices in fourteen countries, and famous for being one of the last Big Law holdouts with a traditional partner model. People did not generally make partners there before they hit forty if ever at all.
"You're a partner at Pestage & Amedda."
"I am."
"There's a number written on the back of this."
"My personal mobile. In case you need to reach me." He pulled out a chair, sat, and undid one button on his jacket. "The page under it is a mutual non-disclosure agreement. It’s standard. I'd like you to sign before we talk, because I can't describe the arrangement without naming people who haven't consented to be named."
Rey looked at Han. Han looked out the window at the fog.
"Han. Is this the part where I find out you've been laundering money?"
"Kid."
"Because if so I'd like to see the villa."
"It's a personal matter," Ben clarified. "Not a criminal one."
"And if I don't sign?"
"Nothing happens," Ben replied curtly. "I’ll just leave and you’ll never hear the proposal. That's how non-disclosure agreements work."
Smart ass. She read it. It was clean. She read it twice anyway, and it stayed clean, which annoyed her. She signed and dated with the pen he offered, and pushed it back.
"For the record, I'm only signing this because Han said please. Now tell me what you want."
Ben returned the pen to an inside pocket. Then he said, in a flat, impossibly smooth voice, that he needed to hire a contractual girlfriend.
Rey choked on her coffee.
He waited, without any apparent enjoyment, while she coughed. Then he handed her a second document: five pages, stapled, a schedule attached, and across the top, in bold caps, AGREEMENT FOR PERSONAL REPRESENTATION SERVICES, which was the single most ridiculous phrase Rey had ever seen on a piece of paper.
She was too curious not to read it.
Twelve appearances. One per month, up to twelve months, weekends only, six hours maximum. Food and transportation provided. Family gatherings and private social events. No work functions unless mutually agreed. No cohabitation. No physical intimacy beyond that which is mutually comfortable in a public setting. Six thousand dollars of allowance for expenses incurred, including but not limited to apparel.
That was the line that got her. Not the proposal, which was insane in a way she almost admired. The apparel.
"There's an allowance for clothes," Rey said. "Because my clothes embarrass you."
"The allowance is for anything you need."
"You itemized apparel. And you did a thing with your face when you walked in."
"My face isn't admissible."
Han made a noise into his coffee that he tried to turn into a cough.
She rolled her eyes and read on, hunting the next thing to mock, and found the money instead.
Five thousand dollars per appearance, payable the day of, not before. Expenses on top.
Half her annual salary for seventy-two hours of work.
She set the page down flat and put one finger on the number, as if it might move. Then she turned and looked at Han's back.
"Han, nobody pays that much for nothing. If I sign this, is there any part of it that ends with me in front of the bar association, or a grand jury, or getting somebody else put in front of one?"
Han took his time pouring out the pasta water, which she didn't love, but eventually he faced her and gave her a straight answer. "It’s a really stupid plan. But no fraud. Nobody gets hurt. Nothing gets stolen. I wouldn’t have let him past my door otherwise, son or no son."
Han had never lied to her. She had no reason to believe he was lying now.
She turned back to Ben. "Key clarification. What's this for?”
He said something about his maternal grandfather's estate, a trust with a condition of distribution, and something about a residuary clause. Rey sat with her hands around a mug and thought: that is the worst lie I have ever heard.
"Your grandfather’s trust’s worth that much trouble?"
"My grandfather is Anakin Skywalker."
Rey stopped.
Every criminal lawyer in California knew that name. You got told about him in your second year, usually by somebody senior and three drinks in. The attorney who could walk anybody out of any building for the right number, who once qualified a chiropractor as a bone expert and won on it. When he’d died three years ago and the obituaries had been extremely careful.
Nobody builds a lie with an absurd fact like this. For the first time since she'd sat down, Rey wasn't so sure he was bullshitting her.
"And the will requires you to have a girlfriend."
"It requires evidence of stability."
"Which you intend to establish with twelve joint apperances."
"With a documented long-term relationship. Yes."
"Conditions like that get challenged," Rey said. "There's a hundred years of law on unreasonable conditions and I'd bet your firm has an associate who could brief it over a weekend."
A shadow of a smirk. "Unfortunately, my grandfather's will was written by an exceptional lawyer."
She looked at the number again.
Then she went back to page one and read the whole thing the way she read a plea offer: slowly, out of order, twice, mouth moving on the parts that mattered. She took the pen out of Ben's jacket pocket herself, because he hadn't offered it and she wasn't going to ask.
She circled 9(c), "such time as the Purpose is no longer served", and wrote DEFINE in the margin.
She struck "mutually comfortable" in the intimacy clause and wrote in "at Jones's sole discretion, exercisable without notice or cause."
She added a line barring photographs, recordings, or posts of her without her written consent for before each instance.
On page four she wrote: "Nothing in this agreement creates an attorney-client relationship, requires Jones to render legal services, or requires any act adverse to her personal interests."
She slid the paper and the pen back. "Those are conditions of my signature. Not suggestions."
Han came off the stove with three plates of spaghetti with meat sauce, a tube of Craft parmesan, and three mismatched forks.
“Eat up.”
Ben glanced at his plate and didn't pick up the fork. "I'm not hungry."
"You drove an hour."
"I already ate."
Han stood there for a moment. Then he picked up his own fork and sat down.
"Suit yourself."
So they ate, and Ben worked.
He went through her markup line by line without saying a word about any of it. He wrote in small square capitals in the margins, and every minute or so he turned the page around and pushed it back across the table so she could read what he'd conceded while she chewed.
9(c) invocable only in writing. Full twelve appearances payable regardless if terminated by the client.
Agreed. Sole discretion, no notice, no cause, no reduction in fee for any exercise of it.
Under the photograph line he'd written a sentence she hadn't asked for at all, indemnifying her at his expense against anything that got out anyway. On page four he simply wrote "Agreed."
Rey put her fork down.
She had negotiated with prosecutors who fought her over five hours of community service like it was coming out of their own pockets. She had asked this man for four things and gotten five, in his own handwriting, in under five minutes.
How much is in that fund?
"Why me?" Rey asked.
Ben nodded at his father. "He trusts you. And you're the type my mother likes."
Not his type. His mother's. “I thought this was about your grandfather’s estate.”
“My mother’s the trustee. She’s the person we need to convince.”
"Then just get your mother to sign off. You're her son."
He looked at her for three full seconds before he answered. The smile stayed on, but it stopped being effortless.
"She's the trustee."
"She's your mother."
"Both are true." He put his pen back in front of her. "She'd recused herself over people she knew in law school. Being her son gives me no advantage. It's the thing everyone admires about her."
Han was looking very hard at his plate.
Rey took in a long breath. “Can you at least tell me her name?”
"Schedule A."
Rey turned to Schedule A.
Leia Organa, Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States (mother).
She read it. She read it three more times. Then she looked up at the man who had been her lifeline since she was fourteen, who had once driven ninety minutes to sit at the back of a courtroom during her first solo prelim and then denied being there.
"Han."
"Yeah."
"Your ex-wife is on the Supreme Court of the United States."
"Yeah."
"You have mentioned this to me exactly zero times."
"Never came up."
"I read you her dissent in Incom. Out loud. In this kitchen. I sat in that chair and read you six pages of it while you cleaned a fish."
"It was a good dissent," Han said.
"You said, and I want to be precise here, 'she always did like the sound of her own footnotes.'"
"Still true."
Rey combed her hair back with her fingers. "I have spent sixteen years thinking you were just a public defender with a bad knee and a boat."
"I am a retired public defender with a bad knee and a boat."
Then the first half of the conversation came back and landed on the second half.
"Wait."
She looked at Ben.
"Justice Organa is Anakin Skywalker's daughter."
"Yes."
"No." Rey shook her head once. "Her confirmation ran for only three days. I watched some of it. If Leia Organa were Anakin Skywalker's daughter, it would have been in the opening statement of every Republican senator on that committee."
"Nobody knew.” Ben shrugged one shoulder. “My biological grandmother died when my mother was two and never said who the father was. The Organas raised my mother. She only found out two years ago, when a probate lawyer called her office about a bequest."
Rey looked down at the schedule again and felt the size of the thing she was being pulled into.
Then, she remembered the seventy thousand eight hundred left on the private loans. She'd signed for them at a folding table in a mall her first year at Berkeley, before she understood what private interest actually did. At the rate of repayment her public defender salary allowed, it would be at least fifteen years before the balance hit zero.
Sixty thousand dollars, all at once. Taxable, but call it forty-eight after the government.
The only thing that stood between her and an amount that would take fifteen years down to something she could see the end of was twelve gatherings with three people related to one of the only people alive she fully trusted.
"Han." She couldn’t believe she was really considering this. “Do you vouch for your son’s character?”
Rey had once watched Han break a five hundred dollar vase at a judge's house and not look uncomfortable. He looked uncomfortable now.
"He won’t do anything untoward to you, and he pays what he owes." A pause. "Everything else, no guarantees."
Not exactly a glowing review, but positive where it mattered, and there was sixty thousand dollars was on the line.
She signed her name, dated it, wrote down her contact information in the bottom margin, and slid it back across the table before she could change her mind.
From the other side of the table came a sound that was almost certainly Ben Solo exhaling.
She looked up fast and found him already moving to stand and putting the signed papers in his bag.
"First appearance is on the twenty-fifth. Dinner in Sausalito. I'll send a copy of the contract and a memorandum by email. Names, relationships, background. Read it in the car if you'd rather."
"You're going to give me homework."
Something happened at the corner of his mouth, fast. "Ms. Jones. My mother is very hard to lie to. I’m giving us a fighting chance."
He buttoned the jacket, and paused at the door with his hand on the frame and looked back. "Dad, you got Tuesday?"
"I've got Tuesday."
He nodded at both of them a final time, gave Chewie a pat on the head, and headed out into the fog.
The memorandum arrived Wednesday at 1:42 a.m. in her email inbox, which said something about his sleep schedule.
Subject: Background memorandum re: 7/25
No message. Just three attachments. She opened the memo file first.
- ATTACHMENTS
1.1 Attachment A, executed contract, for your records
1.2 Attachment B, my background, described at Section 4 below.
1.3 Attachment C, this memo.
- THE PRINCIPALS
2.1 Benjamin Solo, thirty-six. See attachment B for details.
2.2 Leia Organa, sixty-eight. Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States, ten years on the Court. Maintains the family house in Sausalito; the Court's summer recess runs to the first Monday in October. Preferences: punctuality, competence, being disagreed with well. Aversions: name-dropping, dishonesty, and being asked what happens in conference.
2.3 Han Solo. You know him.
2.4 Amilyn Holdo. Retired Presiding Justice, First Appellate District. Justice Organa's closest friend of thirty years. Assume she has already looked you up.
2.5 There will be a black Suburban parked at the bottom of Oleander Street. Do not photograph it, do not mention it at the table.
- NARRATIVE
3.1 We met in March at a bar association reception in the city.
3.2 I found you interesting and asked you out.
3.3 We have been seeing each other since May. We had dinner together at Arquet for our first date on 5/12.
- Attachment B is what a person who had been seeing me for three months would plausibly know. School, work, family, friends, recent travel, childhood pet, and key dates. Study it. Let me know if you have questions. In return, and on the same terms, please send me the equivalent by Sunday.
- Disclosure. If there is anything in your history that a diligent search would surface and that you would prefer I not hear about for the first time at a dinner table, please tell me now. I am not asking you to explain it. I am asking not to be surprised by it. Assume Justice Holdo is diligent.
Rey read section 5 four times in the courthouse hallway outside Department 12, with a file balanced on her forearm and a prosecutor she needed to catch before noon was walking down the corridor.
She could lie. It was sealed. Sealed meant it didn't exist, legally, and she had spent a decade repeating to herself that sentence until she believed it.
Except sealed only stopped the county. It didn't fully stop a retired presiding justice of the First Appellate District who knew a lot of people from finding out about it.
She typed the first line, took a deep breath, and typed the rest of the lines.
Section 3
This is a terrible story. Bar association receptions have sign-in sheets and four hundred witnesses. Use the truth: we met at your father's house in May when I came by to get his thoughts on a suppression motion. You happened to be there and you corrected me on a citation in the passing. Nobody can disprove a Friday.
Section 4
I will provide a similar document by EoD Saturday.Section 5
Fine. Here it is, and I'd rather do it in writing than out loud, so don't call me about it.I was in the system from eight. At fourteen I was running with a group of older kids in Oakland and I took things that weren't mine, mostly small, for about a year. Then they did a job that wasn't small and used me as a scapegoat. I was charged with grand theft auto. Petition sustained on a lesser count, wardship, probation, no time in custody. The record was sealed when I was nineteen and I disclosed all of it to the State Bar in my moral character application, in more detail than I've just given you, and they admitted me anyway.
I don't know if Han ever told you. I'm assuming he didn't, because he's never once told me a single thing about you either, but your father was the public defender on my case. That’s how I know him. He’s the reason why I’m a public defender now.
If Justice Holdo has it, she has it. I'm not going to sit at your mother's table and pretend I grew up somewhere with a lawn.
She sent it, put her phone in her jacket pocket, and went and caught the prosecutor before noon.
It was almost three hours before the reply came, and by then she was eating a burrito standing up at the counter in the courthouse basement, which was the closest thing to lunch the day was going to offer.
We'll go with your story since it works better. Revised memo attached.
Nothing in Section 5 requires action. It will likely not come up. If it does, honesty is the best option with my mother, but I’ll follow your lead.
Rey read the line twice standing over a paper tray of foil and rice, and could not tell whether his nonchalance was a kindness or indifference.
Ben Solo at 5:41 p.m.
Outside. No rush.
Rey pulled the curtain back an inch. Ben was standing beside an Audi with his hands behind his back, phone already back in his pocket. He saw the curtain move and raised one hand.
She dropped it, but not before Rose walked into the living room, cereal bowl balanced on her palm. "What are you looking at?"
"Nothing."
Rose got to the window and pulled the curtain the rest of the way.
"Okay, who is that?"
"Nobody. Go back to your cereal."
"There's a suit guy leaning on an Audi," Rose leaned into the glass with too much interest, "and he’s looking at us."
Ben raised his hand again. Rose waved back before Rey could stop her.
"Don't wave at him."
"I already did." Rose turned around with a Cheshire’s Cat grin that Rey didn’t like. "So… how long has this been a thing?"
“It’s not a thing.”
"You're in your fancy occasion dress, at six, on a Saturday, and there's a man in a suit waiting outside."
"We’re just,” she paused to find the right words, “going to a work dinner.”
"On a Saturday?" Rose put her hands up. "Fine. Not a thing. But if the not-a-thing buys you dinner somewhere with cloth napkins, I want to hear about it."
"It's at the nice side of Marin. Everything up there has cloth napkins."
"Then I want to hear about all of it." Rose sat back down, took her spoon, and pointed it at the door. "Go. Not-a-thing is waiting."
Rey got as far as the coat hook.
"One photo," Rose called. "Blurry is fine."
"No."
The fog had come over the hill an hour ago and hadn't moved. She buttoned her coat at the top of the stairwell, took the flight of stairs one step at a time in shoes she'd worn exactly once that were an inch taller than what she was used to walking in, and let the door swing shut behind her.
Ben was already holding the passenger door open. He looked at her the way he had in his father's kitchen, quick, top to bottom, except this time it stopped somewhere in the middle and started over.
"Something wrong with the dress?"
"No." He kept his hand on the door. "It’s nice."
"Try to sound less shocked."
She got into the car without tripping, which she counted as a win.
The interior of his car was leather and wood, and still had the new smell. Nothing on the seats, nothing in the cupholders, not a receipt or a parking stub anywhere she could see. A far cry from her Corolla that had a phone charger held together with duck tape, two months worth of parking stubs, and a bag of court files in the footwell.
He took Guerrero north, then Octavia, and they sat in the Saturday crawl toward the freeway.
"You wrote in your file you like sweets. There's a box in the back."
There was. Two éclairs from Tartine.
"Is this in the contract?"
"It's part of expected expenses."
"You're expensing pastry."
"I'm expensing goodwill," he said, and changed lanes.
She ate one over the box, holding it with one hand, and did not say thank you.
"You have chocolate on your thumb. Do you want a napkin?"
She licked it off. He kept his eyes on the road and handed her a napkin anyway.
Somewhere past the Waldo Tunnel he said, "My work will come up. It always does. She'll ask what I've been busy with, and then she'll file her monthly dissent. Don't try to help."
"Help?"
"Don't defend me. She'll hear anything you say as a line I gave you, and then she'll be disappointed in both of us."
Rey folded the napkin in half and then in half again. "What's the dissent, exactly? You made partner at a firm people spend their whole careers not making partner at."
"Her mother did civil rights. Her husband spent thirty years in Alameda County representing the poor. She is a sitting supreme court justice that champions equality and minority rights. Her son does M&A for any companies that pay enough."
"Some of those companies employ a lot of people."
"You can try that one at the table," Ben said and signaled to take the exit. "See how it goes."
They fell back into silence until they arrived at their destination.
Leia Organa's house was red brick, two stories going up the hill, with windows tall enough to walk through and the bay behind them. Grass in the front. Camellias by the door, clipped by somebody who probably came on a schedule. It was likely worth more than the entire block Rey had grown up on in Oakland.
In the hall, a bowl of keys and a framed photograph of a woman at a lectern in a courtroom, hair pinned, collar wide, jacket too big in the shoulders. She looked nothing like Ben.
"My mother, Breha Organa. Second Circuit, 1974.”
Rey turned to find Leia Organa looking at her. The justice was in a cream silk blouse buttoned all the way to the throat, grey trousers, a narrow belt, her hair up. Rey felt small despite being half a foot taller.
"Mom. This is Rey."
Rey had to stop herself from bowing. "Justice Organa."
"Call me Leia in this house, or we'll be here all night." She had her son's eyes and none of his stillness, and her hands moved as she talked. "Come in. I hope you like fish."
The house was warm, and it smelled like butter and lemon. Amilyn Holdo was already in the front room with a glass of white wine. She was tall, silver hair cut blunt at the jaw, and she stood up to shake Rey's hand and held it about a second longer than the handshake needed.
"Rey Jones," Amilyn said. "Public defender in San Francisco."
"Yes."
"Which team?"
"Felony trial."
"Then you know Poe Dameron."
"He’s my supervisor."
"He clerked for me in 2013. He was terrible at it and very good in the courtroom." Amilyn let go of her hand. "Sit down. Don't sit in that one, it's Han's."
Han came out of the kitchen with a jug of water. He nodded at her but otherwise didn’t acknowledge their connection or the fact he had a hand in putting her in the room before sitting down at his seat. Ben pulled her chair out, then put his arm along the back of it once, not touching her, and took it away again when a woman Rey was never introduced to came out with a silver trolly with a bottle of expensive looking wine and five plates of cod with green beans with almonds and small fingerling potatoes. She sat a plate in front of each person, filled everyone's wine glasses, and went away.
Everyone dug in.
Leia asked about her caseload. Rey said fifty-six open files, and Leia said that was obscene, and Han said it had been obscene in 2000s too. Rey talked about a client of hers, a nineteen-year-old with a felony vandalism charge for a mural, and Leia put her fork down to listen, and asked two questions that went directly to the weakest part of the case. Rey answered both. Leia nodded once, and something in the room got easier.
Ben ate about a third of what was on his plate and moved the rest around with the mastery of a man who had done it often. He said almost nothing, and when he did it was one line, dry, timed to land after somebody else's setup. Twice, Rey caught Leia looking at him.
Nobody said anything about the trust. Nobody mentioned Anakin Skywalker.
At the far end of the table, Leia refilled her own water glass, took a tablet from a small enamel box beside it, and swallowed it without breaking the sentence she was in the middle of. Then she set the glass down and looked at Rey.
"Tell me how you met my son," Leia said.
Rey started to repeat their cover story exactly. "At Han's. In May."
"You were at his house."
"I'm at his house about once a month. He feeds me and I complain about my caseload." She sliced a bean in half. "That day I had a suppression motion due Monday and no theory for it, so I sat at his table and talked around it in hypotheticals until he told me what was wrong with the way I was thinking about it. He consults for free."
"And my son was there."
"He was on the phone on the front porch," Rey shot her a smile. "For about forty minutes."
"That sounds like him."
"I thought he was a client. Nobody wears that suit to Half Moon Bay."
Ben set his fork down and wiped his mouth. "It was a Friday. I came from the office."
He said it without looking at her, evenly, then gave her hand a small squeeze for effects.
"Then what?" Leia asked.
"Then he came inside, looked at my legal pad on his way past, and told me the citation on it was reversed."
"Was it?"
"It was."
Amilyn laughed into her napkin. "And you found that attractive?"
Rey shrugged. "He saved me an hour."
The woman from the kitchen brought out a cardigan. Leia put it on and turned to Ben. "What was your first date like?"
"We had dinner at Arquet."
"He ordered for me," Rey added, because it felt like the sort of thing men like him did. "I let him do it that one time."
Amilyn smiled. "What did you have?"
They had aligned on five pages of personal details, but never aligned on exactly what they had ordered on their first date. Rey chose the safest dish she could remember from the restaurant's menu. "The chicken."
The room did something she couldn't read. Han coughed. Amilyn grew thoughtful. Leia turned her water glass a quarter turn and left it there.
"It's the thing they're known for, and she really likes chicken," Ben said, unhurried, reaching for the water. "So I ordered it and just ate the sides." He filled Rey's glass first, then his own. "She hasn't let me forget ordering something I don't eat."
He doesn't eat chicken. Rey took a long drink of her wine to hide her dismay. She turned back to her fish and didn’t dare to say more about the chicken, or about Arquet, or about May.
"You said you go out to Han's once a month," Amilyn said quietly. "How long have you known him?"
Rey was so thankful for the change in subject she answered without thinking. "Over fifteen years."
Amilyn did the math out loud. "You met Han in your teens?"
Rey reached for her wine and found she had already finished it. "Han does a lot of mentoring."
"I didn't know he does mentoring," Amilyn said, not unkindly, just stating the truth. "I asked him to take my clerk to lunch once and he told me he wasn't running a daycare."
Han scowled. "Amilyn."
"I'm making conversation."
"You're taking a deposition."
Rey opened her mouth to say something about a legal clinic.
"Rey met Dad in Alameda County," Ben said it casually like he was talking about the weather. "He was her public defender."
Rey turned and stared at him.
She had written it to him ten days ago, in an email, from a courthouse hallway, because he'd asked her not to be surprised by anything and she'd decided it was cheaper to say it once in writing than to flinch at it later. Don't call me about it, she'd written. He had not called. He had waited until there were two judges at the table and then set it down like an exhibit.
"Grand theft auto," Rey supplied before anyone could ask, because there was clearly no way out except through. "I was fourteen. I was with the wrong people."
Leia looked at Rey with her hands folded and finally broke her silence. "How old were the people you were with?"
Nobody had ever asked her that when she told the story in the past. Not once in sixteen years.
"Nineteen," Rey swallowed. "The other one was twenty-two."
"Then you didn't do it," Leia said.
Rey looked at her dinner for a long moment, picked her fork back up, and forced herself to eat the rest of it.
When her plate was cleared she excused herself.
The washroom was down the hall and past the staircase. She put both hands on the edge of the sink the moment the door shut. Her hands were steady. They had been steady all night, through the chicken and through Amilyn and through the words her public defender coming out of Ben's mouth in front of two judges, and they were steady now. Her legs that had other ideas.
She stood there until they stopped tapping, and used the time on refreshing her lipstick, and adjusting the dress, which was four years old and had been to two weddings and a funeral and was holding up better than she was. Five thousand dollars, she reminded her reflection, and felt considerably better about the entire evening.
Coming back she turned left when she should have turned right, and instead of the dining room, she found herself outside a room with two lamps, a long mirror over a mantel, and a fireplace that wasn't lit.
She heard them before she saw them. Leia's voice, low, and Ben's back through the half-open door, and mirror giving her his face.
"You told the table about her record," Leia said.
"Amilyn was three questions from it. It was better coming from me."
"Did Rey want it to come from anybody?"
A pause. Rey looked at the floor with suspended breath.
"No," Ben said finally.
She should go. She had known that since the second sentence. But the hall's runner ended four feet short of where she stood, and they would definitely hear if she left.
"Do you even like her?"
Ben deflected. "Do you?"
"I do," Leia said. "I like her enormously. But I don’t want you to bring her here just to humor me.”
"I brought her because I'm seeing her."
A chair took someone's weight. "Did you really?" Leia let the question sit. "The chicken. You had a sentence ready inside of a second and a half, and it was a good one. It's what I pay for when I hire someone like you,” she paused, then added with sharpness that could cut, "Except I don't hire people like you. Companies do. Forty thousand an hour, and what they're buying is exactly what I watched you do to me over a fish."
In the mirror, Ben smiled.
Not a flinch first. Not a beat of anything and then the smile. The same practice smile she saw at Han's simply appeared and stayed.
"I'm well aware of what you think about my career."
"Don't do that," Leia snapped. "This has nothing to do with your career, Ben. All these years. Not a name. Not a bad month. You say all the right words, send flowers on my birthdays, and take me to my appointments, but I could not tell anyone what my son is really thinking or what he actually likes."
The kitchen door half way down the hall swung open. Something went into the sink, water and steel, loud enough to fill the hall. Rey took the opportunity to escape. Four fast steps to the runner, and then the rest of it at a normal pace, until she was back in the dining room.
In the dining room, dessert had been laid out on the table. Amilyn and Han were chatting with each other over coffee.
Rey went to the window instead of her seat, because her heart was still going and her legs would not stay still. The overheard conversation rang in her head with no to place to land. City light scattered in the dark on the hill and down to the water, and she counted the boat lights in the channel until Ben came and stood beside her.
She turned to look at him. He wasn’t performing anymore, he simply looked tired, the way anyone looks at the end of a long night.
"We can leave after Mom comes back."
Leia came back six minutes later and did not sit down so much as arrive at the chair by the window and feel into it.
"We have to go," Ben announced. "I have work tomorrow."
Leia put her hand out from the chair without getting up. Rey took it. It was cooler than her own and thinner than she'd expected, but the grip was firm.
"You'll come again."
"I'd like to."
"Good. Amilyn will have finished her checking by then and you'll have an easier evening. Bring an opinion about something next time. I want to hear what you think when nobody's interrogating you."
Han walked them out. At the car he patted the back of Rey's shoulder. "See you next month?"
"At your place. You and me."
"Yeah," Han said. He looked at his son over the roof of the car, and said it again. "Yeah."
The black Suburban was still at the bottom of the street. They drove past it in silence, and neither of them said anything until the on-ramp.
"That went badly," Ben said quietly.
"That was catastrophic!" Rey put her head back against the seat. "The information I sent you by email! I only gave it to you so you wouldn't be surprised. Not so you could hand it to a table."
"I used my judgement. I thought it was better than wait for Amilyn to finish her interrogation."
"That's not for you to decide!"
"I know." He said it a second time without any polish. "I know. I'm sorry."
She sucked in a breath. "Also, who doesn't eat chicken?"
"Food poisoning in Chicago. I was nine. Threw up for two weeks." He changed lanes. "I haven't been able to put chicken in my mouth since."
"Why wasn't that in the memorandum?"
"My mistake."
Rey threw her hands up. "She was really angry back in that room with the fireplace."
His hands tightened on the wheel.
"How much did you hear?"
"Enough." The bridge lights came up and went past in their long, even rhythm, and Rey watched them go. "You know what? I won’t cash tonight’s check.”
"That's unnecessary."
"It isn't about necessary. I rather not leave paper trails since we failed at the objective. If I don’t cash the check then there’s no service rendered and we can both just think of tonight as a bad first date. You can take the money and find somebody who's better at acting."
Ben inhaled. The car gone a long way without him answering.
"One more."
"Why?"
”If we stop now it’ll just prove my mother’s suspicions. One more time." He glanced at her. His Adam’s apple bobbed. "Please."
He didn't say anything else or looked at her again, but the please grew between them until it filled the whole car.
"Fine," she said, thinking how it should cost him double. "One more. But if you don’t figure out how we can get better at this, I'm done."