Justified

by Jay Crownover

  I liked to think over the years I’d proven myself, that I deserved my office on Main Street and my roster full of clients. I was active in the community, even after my separation. I cared about my neighbors and the goings-on in my city. No one was happier to see Case’s father leave his position than me. One of the reasons I’d been adamant about returning to Loveless after college was the memory of marginalized men and women being railroaded by an unjust system, headed by Conrad Lawton. I hated the way the former sheriff used his own biases in determining the guilt and innocence of offenders in Loveless.

  In a bigger city, I knew my impact would be minimal. I would be one voice of many screaming into the wind. In Loveless, my voice was loud and impossible to ignore. I could stand out, rather than blend in. Something I’d always done anyway, but now I understood how to use my differences to my advantage. I desperately wanted—no needed—to make a name for myself. I planned to fight hard for all of my clients, regardless of what economic and social background they came from. I truly believed I could do a lot of good for this community.

  Instead, as soon as my feet hit the Texas dust, I was immediately swept up in the privilege and prestige of having the Barlow name and was handed cases and clients I would have preferred to skip over. Clients with too much money and an ax to grind.

  Clients like Becca Lawton.

  When Becca fired me right there in the middle of the courtroom as soon as Hayes picked his father over her, I couldn’t stop the wave of relief that swept over me. Dealing with the woman and her outrageous demands was exhausting. She was at the top of the list of unreasonable clients, and she just kept asking for more. Always threatening to disclose Case’s supposed secret when she didn’t get her way. I had no clue how Case continued to meet her demands, but he did each and every time as long as it meant he was allowed access to his son. When the time came for Hayes Lawton to choose which parent he wanted to be his primary caregiver, I had no doubt he was going to pick his father. I think Case and I were the only adults in the hearing not surprised that the now-teenager picked his father over his mother.

  When David and his father heard about Becca firing me, it had been a major turning point in my professional and personal relationship with them both. My father-in-law wanted his client back. My husband wanted to make his father happy. Neither of them cared that Hayes was better off with Case and that I felt awful about my role in keeping them apart for so long. It was in those moments and in the center of those conversations I realized I’d lost my drive, my purpose. I planned on coming back to Loveless to make a difference, but all I’d done was slide into the comfortable role of being David Barlow’s wife. I’d planned to scream about injustice and had ended up whispering meekly instead.

  I tried to talk to David about how unfulfilled and empty I felt, but all I got was a kiss on the forehead and a promise I would feel better about things after a good night’s sleep. He handled our endless debate about continuing to try for children in the same way. He didn’t take my complaints or steadily growing melancholy seriously. In the end, I’d had no choice but to walk away. It was the best decision for both of us, even if David still couldn’t see it.

  Now that I’d had space and time to process the way everything broke down, I knew I had to take responsibility for allowing myself to become complacent. Being with David and being a part of the Barlow family was easy. I had status. I had friends. I had a guaranteed job. Going back to being the awkward and admittedly strange girl, Aspen Keating from Chicago, was much harder. She didn’t have any of the things Aspen Barlow did. Things that were surprisingly easy to give up when push came to shove.

  As it turned out, I didn’t really like the so-called friends I’d made through my association with David. The contacts didn’t matter when it came time to represent the people who really needed my help. And status, well status was nice, but I’d survived without it when I was younger, and I wasn’t exactly missing out on it now. I was too busy trying to make an actual difference in people’s lives to wonder whether or not they were talking about me behind my back. I’d considered getting a cat to combat the lingering loneliness, but I worked too much and my hours were too unpredictable. I didn’t want a pet to feel abandoned while I tried to figure out once again who I was supposed to be.

  Shaking myself out of those thoughts, I leaned back against the headboard of my bed and opened my laptop. I wanted to look over my most difficult, volatile cases to see if a name or two popped out. I was sure the break-in at my office was tied to my work. Taking up for the abused and neglected meant there was a monster sitting on the other side of the aisle. I was no stranger to just how awful humans could treat one another.

  At the top of the list was a husband currently out on bail after breaking his wife’s jaw and putting both of their children in the ER. I was representing the wife in the divorce and petitioning the court for protection orders for the entire family against him. He was a bully with a hot temper, and I could easily see him scrawling those ugly, libelous words across my office window. He’d screamed them at me in court. I’d have to check when his attorney got him sprung from lockup to make sure the times lined up, but he was definitely a suspect.

  There was also a teenager I was trying to get emancipated from his neglectful mother. The DA had asked me to take on the case after a neighbor called to report a foul smell coming from the property next door. When the police responded they found a woman hoarding not only pets but also keeping her children in squalor and filth. Social Services intervened for the younger ones, but there was a teenaged boy who hovered on the edge of being an adult. He wanted to be emancipated so he could gain custody of his younger siblings. It was a tricky, complicated case, made even more so by the sheer insanity of the mother. She was also currently out on bail awaiting her trial for several counts of child abuse. I didn’t hesitate to add her name to the list.

  I jotted down a few more generally disgruntled former clients, like Becca Lawton. I couldn’t really imagine the woman holding such a massive grudge after all these years, but she had been pretty pissed when her son walked away from her…taking her monthly check from Case with him.

  The list, along with the thought of the mess waiting for me tomorrow, was starting to make my head hurt. I shut the computer down, chugged the rest of my wine, and toyed with the idea of getting up and turning off the lights. Deciding I was too tired and still too freaked out, I closed the door and locked it when I entered the room, crawled under the covers, threw my arm over my eyes, and went to bed with nearly every light in the house left on. Sleep came easily after the wine and the long day, but my dreams were anything but sweet.

  I kept seeing red words dripping like blood down snowy white walls. The letters mixed together to form every insult, affront, and slur that had been hurled my way since I was young. I kept trying to escape the room, but there was no way out. The taunts and jeers kept chasing me, and I was sad, even in my sleep, that I didn’t have a younger version of Case Lawton there to act as a buffer from all the ugliness. I’d had a bit of hero worship going on back then, and apparently, I still saw him as some kind of savior. Soon, dream-me had red smeared all over her hands. It was all very disturbing, even more so when the room started to get suffocatingly hot. I tried to wipe sweat away from my brow but only ended up dragging paint across my face. I told myself to wake up, screamed silently in my head it was time to open my eyes, but the red words and the heat continued to swirl around me in a confusing mess. The acrid smell of smoke obliterated my senses, and I started to wonder if I was dreaming of being in hell.

  I kicked the covers off, thinking it would cool me down, but as soon as I moved I started to cough and choke. Suddenly it felt like I was trying to escape my bedding. I couldn’t breathe and came awake with a jerk when I realized the smell of smoke wasn’t something I was merely dreaming about. Kicking the comforter to the floor, I blinked burning eyes into the haze slowly and steadily filling my room.

  “What in the hell?” I scrambled out o
f bed, head cocked, listening for the wail of my smoke detectors. I immediately regretted opening my mouth as the taste of smoke and char coated my tongue and sent my entire system into fight-or-flight mode.

  The house was eerily quiet aside from a very distinct pop and crackle right outside of my bedroom door. Coughing and wheezing, with tears rolling down my cheeks, I rushed over to the door. I was reaching for the brass knob when all the fire safety reminders from elementary school suddenly resurfaced. Instead of touching the metal with my bare hand, I wrapped the loose fabric at the bottom of my shirt around my palm and cautiously reached out. I immediately jerked back with a hiss. My palm burned with pain, and I could hardly move my fingers. The metal was hot enough to scald, and I could feel heat on the other side doing its best to push through the heavy wooden door.

  Stumbling, I wiped at my sweaty face and did my best not to cough up a lung as the haze in my room thickened and made it even harder to breathe. Almost blind from tears and smoke, I felt my way along one of the walls to where my en suite bathroom was located. It was the one room where I hadn’t turned on a light before going to bed. I had to grope around for a washcloth, but eventually, my fingers touched soft fabric. I ran it under the faucet for a brief minute before slapping the soaked wetness over my mouth. If I wasn’t going out through my door that meant my bedroom window was my only option, but I needed to be able to breathe and think clearly enough to pry it open and climb out onto the roof.

  The heat in my room was nearly unbearable, and I could now see a bright red-and-orange glow along the line at the base of the door. The fire was very real. This wasn’t a dream. It was a nightmare. I was struggling to take a full breath through my makeshift mask, and I was starting to get very light-headed.

  My heart was racing so fast I was worried it might give out, and I could hear the rush of blood between my ears. I was doing my best to keep a level head, but my body was betraying me.

  Once I reached the window, it took a solid minute to get my limbs to cooperate and get the little latch and the lock to release. By that time the smoke was so thick, I couldn’t even see my hands in front of my face, and my eyes were burning so badly all I wanted to do was keep them squeezed shut. I banged my forehead against the glass and ordered myself to focus. There was only one way out of this room, and I was staring right at it.

  The bedroom door gave way with a sudden crack. Flames leaped into the room impatiently and immediately started to race across the floor. I’d been afraid before, but coming face-to-face with the fire was horrifying. It was eating up my entire bedroom, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before the flames were reaching for me as well.

  Focus. Focus. Focus. I chanted the words inside my head repeatedly as I finally maneuvered the lock open. My fingers were covered with soot by the time I got the window jerked up wide enough for me to slip through.

  With the sudden influx of oxygen the fire behind me roared even louder and burned even brighter. I stumbled across the rough shingles in bare feet, still struggling to see and breathe as I made my way to the edge of the roof.

  My house wasn’t huge, but standing over the drop-off, looking down at my small lawn, it suddenly seemed gigantic. A particularly violent coughing fit hit me, and I nearly toppled off my precarious perch. The night sky and the grass below sort of blended together as vertigo threatened to take my legs out from underneath me. I blinked away the tears that were still obliterating my vision and tried to reassure myself if I jumped, a broken leg was the lesser of two evils.

  Vaguely I thought I heard sirens somewhere off in the distance, but maybe it was wishful thinking.

  “Aspen. What’s going on? Are you all right?” Captain Idiot asking the obvious was my neighbor. I didn’t usually run into the people who lived on either side of me, but occasionally the husband who was now standing in my yard in a bathrobe and flip-flops would wave to me when he was taking his kids to school. Suddenly he seemed like the best neighbor in the whole world. I was so happy to see him.

  “I need a way to get down.” The words were hard to get out, and I wasn’t sure they were loud enough to hear. My throat felt like it was made of sandpaper and my lungs were barely working.

  “I called nine-one-one. Help is on the way.”

  There was a long pause where I sat down on the side of my roof and let my legs dangle over the edge. I could feel the heat building at my back. The fire was getting louder and louder. I was going to have to jump. There wasn’t going to be enough time for help to arrive. I was going to pass out. I could feel unconsciousness pulling hard at me. My vision narrowed to pinpoints, and my lungs screamed in agony with every breath.

  “How on earth did your house catch on fire? Didn’t you update the wiring when you moved in?” Okay. The dad next door was starting to seem less helpful. Couldn’t he see I was about to break my damn neck by jumping off my roof?

  Taking as big a breath as my injured lungs would allow, I put my hands next to my hips and scooted as close to the edge as I could manage. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed to whatever god might be listening that my landing wouldn’t hurt too badly. And then I pushed myself off the ledge.

  I hit the ground with a thump that rattled every bone in my body. Both my elbows smacked into the lawn with enough force to make my head spin, and I felt one of my ankles pop in a totally unnatural way. My spine shook so hard I felt the impact in my teeth, and the little air in my lungs was forced out in a whoosh.

  I couldn’t pry my eyes open, but I could feel tears of pain mixing with the tears from the smoke. The unhelpful neighbor was yelling something at someone, but I hurt too much, and my head was spinning too fast to care what was going on beyond the agony radiating throughout my body.

  “Aspen. Open your eyes.” The familiar voice managed to thread through the fireworks of anguish exploding behind my eyes. “Look at me.” Normally I hated how bossy and rude Case Lawton was, but at this very moment, all I wanted to do was obey him. And hug him. Yeah, I kinda always wanted to do that, but even more so right now.

  The sound of sirens became louder, but so did the sound of the fire. I tried as hard as I could to get my eyes open, but they didn’t want to cooperate. I painfully rolled to my side as another fit of body-racking coughs rattled me. I felt a hand slide through my hair and something cold was pressed to my forehead. It felt so good a sigh escaped my injured throat.

  “You really jumped off the damn roof?” Case’s deep voice was both soothing and irritating at the same time, but I didn’t want to move away from that hand in my hair. “Not sure if I’m impressed or pissed off, Counselor.”

  How he felt didn’t matter. I didn’t have a choice, and once the fire was done devouring my home, I wasn’t going to have anything left to my name.

  It was a terrifying thought. Almost as scary as jumping off the roof into the darkness. Adrenaline tried to get me to open my eyes once again, but I had nothing left to give. When the blackness overtook me, it didn’t come softly and quietly, it pushed its way into my head and swept me away with the force of a hurricane. I free-fell into the darkness with the same rush I felt when I jumped off of my house, only this landing was much softer.

  Chapter 4

  Case

  So glad I didn’t go through with the urge to get a cat.” Aspen’s voice was barely recognizable under the wheeze from her ravaged throat.

  I kept my hand on her head as her eyelids stopped fluttering behind her tightly closed lids. Her black eyelashes were an inky fan casting shadows over white cheeks. Her skin was several shades paler than normal and streaked with varying shades of black and gray soot. Her breathing was slow and shallow, her chest barely moving. I could see that her ankle was already puffy and turning an ugly shade of purple and black. The hand she had lying limp and lifeless across her stomach was also red and irritated-looking, the fingers slightly blistered. And when I moved my hand through her dark hair, they came away wet and sticky with blood. I decided I was fully pissed and no part impressed that the crazy woma
n had jumped off her roof instead of waiting for help to arrive.

  “Is she going to be okay? I can’t believe she jumped off the roof!” The man hovering over my shoulder dressed in a bathrobe and very little else was starting to get on my nerves.

  “If you saw her standing on the roof and knew the house was on fire, why didn’t you run and grab a ladder or something and help her down?” I couldn’t keep the snap of anger out of my voice when I asked the question. I understood the guy was just a concerned neighbor, but seeing Aspen laid out on the grass so quiet and still, the opposite of how she normally was, had unreasonable anger pushing against my skin.

  Bathrobe Guy crossed his arms over his chest and looked down his nose at me. “Everything happened really fast. We smelled the smoke, I called nine-one-one on my way out the door, but by the time I got into Aspen’s yard she was already on the roof.” The man huffed a little and mumbled, “She didn’t scream for help. We didn’t hear smoke detectors go off. The only indication anything was wrong was the smell of the smoke. I didn’t know how bad the fire was until I got in front of the house. I could see the flames shooting out of the upper windows once I reached the sidewalk. She had no choice but to go out onto the roof.”

  But she didn’t have to jump.

  Less than ten minutes ago I was woken up by the call that there was an emergency on Aspen’s block. I was out the door and on my way to her house in under two minutes, knowing the fire and rescue team would beat me to the scene. I’d pulled into her small neighborhood just as the fire truck was coming to a stop in front of her house. We all watched in horrified captivation as the small, dark-haired woman pushed herself off of the roof and landed with a heavy thud in the grass. I couldn’t even begin to imagine the fear and desperation that had driven Aspen onto her precarious perch in the first place. But watching her flail in the air and land like a broken doll in a limp heap, I had to believe there was a better solution.