“This happens a lot to kids who age out of the system,” Mr. Reinhart says, seeming to ignore that last shred of hope I’m still holding on to. “Like we talked about before, even if we could scrape together enough money to get him out on bail, once this goes to court, there won’t be much we can do.”
Mrs. Reinhart shakes her head while stirring her tea. “If we could afford a good lawyer, he’d be fine. Just like those rich brats who get off scot-free after driving drunk and killing someone. Those are the people the law should throw behind bars.”
My jaw hurts. Closing my eyes, I take a deep breath and try to settle down. These people are kind souls and they’re trying to help. I can’t direct all of my anger at them.
“Thank you for trying,” I say, making an effort to smile, but it comes out like a frown. Even with all the despair roiling around my insides, I suddenly feel a spark of something in me. Like the steam from my cup of tea, a warmth rises in my chest.
A sign.
If Elijah had money, he could get out of this. Rich people get out of worse things all the time. My knuckles go white on the table in front of me. My resolve is set, and there’s no turning back now.
He just needs a good lawyer.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
At school, I forgo doing my makeup work in an effort to Google everything possible about local lawyers and how to find the best one. I wear an oversized hoodie and hide my phone in my sleeve so I can slouch over my desktop in class and secretly figure out how I’m going to make this plan of mine work. I’m pretty sure the whole process is nothing like what I’ve seen on TV and in the movies, so I want to go into this prepared and not like an idiot teenager with no clue of how life works. I need to find someone who will believe in me and work with me. Unlike Sasha’s adventures, I’m planning this one, which means I have to take the reins.
The Greenwood Group is just down the road from Mr. Cade’s office, and they are similarly ranked in online reviews. Even though my best friend’s dad is the best lawyer in Texas, I think I’ve found a good second in Max Greenwood.
There’s an online form to request a free consultation, free being the key word here, and I fill it out in history class. My research has informed me that I’ll need to pay this guy a retainer fee when I hire him, probably to the tune of a few thousand dollars, but I shove that to the back of my long list of worries to deal with later. I’ll find a way to make this work. I have to.
By the time the eighth period bell rings, Mr. Greenwood’s assistant has replied to my email, saying she can fit me in for a consultation today at four thirty. My heart races with the thrill of possibility and I respond right away.
I rush home after school and change into a pair of dress slacks that I only own from my incredibly short tenure in the debate club freshman year. They’re a little tight, but they still fit and I match them with a navy blue button-up blouse that was an ugly gift from my aunt Renee last Christmas. These are the most professional clothes I have, and I’m grateful I let them hang out, ignored and hated in the back of my closet for so long. Today, they’re going to help me make a good impression.
The Greenwood Group is a squat building at the end of Main Street, tucked off the road a bit. Unlike the tall, gray building where Mr. Cade works, this place looks like an old house that was turned into a business. There are flowers planted all along the edges of the parking lot and even more flowers at the entrance. I take a breath and open the door.
Soft jazz music plays from somewhere in the distance, and I’m immediately greeted with a smile from the woman at the front desk. She has dark skin and short, curly brown hair and is wearing a gorgeous string of pearls over a shirt that’s not all that different from mine. I smile inwardly at my clothing choice, feeling confident that I can pull off the mature vibe for a few more minutes.
“How may I help you?” the woman asks. The name engraved on the brass plate on her desk tells me she’s Marietta Brooks, the woman who emailed me earlier today.
“I’m Raquel Clearwater,” I say, shoulders back, head held high. This is what Sasha would do, I know, and I am determined to make her proud. “I have a consultation with Mr. Greenwood at four thirty.”
“If you’d like to have a seat, he’ll be right out,” she says, gesturing to a coffee station against the wall. “Would you like some coffee?”
I say yes, because it feels like the mature thing to do, and I pour myself a cup even though my stomach is so nervous I don’t think I can swallow a single sip of anything right now. The cup sits warm in my hands as I watch the seconds tick by on the decorative wrought iron clock on the wall. The second hand is only a few seconds past four thirty when Mr. Greenwood walks out.
He looks exactly like his picture on his website. Tall, well-dressed, bright silver hair with a little black left around his sideburns. “Miss Clearwater,” he says in a booming voice that I visualize him using in the courtroom as he gets Elijah out of trouble. “I’m Max Greenwood. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
I stand up, shifting the coffee to my left hand. I shake his hand, a jagged smile forming on my lips. “Hello,” I say feebly. Ugh.
I follow him to his office, and I try not to compare its homey vibe to the vast glass and metal intimidation of Mr. Cade’s office. A thousand framed pictures of his wife and kids does not mean Mr. Greenwood won’t be a tough lawyer in court. Besides, he’s all I’ve got if I’m going to keep my promise to Sasha to leave her parents out of this.
“How has your day been so far?” Mr. Greenwood asks as we take our seats on either side of his desk.
“As good as it can be, considering I had to suffer through school,” I say, and he chuckles. This is all part of my plan — to be the kind and upstanding teenager who needs a little help. Maybe in the form of a payment plan, reduced prices and some kind of grant money.
“Try to enjoy it while you can, Miss Clearwater. Sometimes I wish I could go back to my high school years. Back then I could run a five-minute mile and eat whatever I wanted.”
Enough of the pleasantries. I sit on the edge of my seat, shoulders straight. I’ve rehearsed this speech in my head all day. I will explain the situation. I’ll lament how the system has failed an upstanding member of society. I’ll play on the mission statement on his website: using integrity, excellence, innovation and respect to give legal service to his clients in unique ways that pertain to each client’s individual needs. I’ll concede that, yes, I am a poor high school student and Elijah is no better off, but I’ll urge that I’m capable of paying his fees if we can get creative with payment options.
Before I say a word, Mr. Greenwood pulls his bushy eyebrows together. He presses a finger to his lips and then points it toward me. “How do I know you?” he says, concentrating on me.
“I, uh, you don’t?” I say. I know him, though. He graduated from South Texas College of Law and has been licensed to practice in the state since 1989. He’s won awards and participates in charity events all over the state, which is one of the reasons I’m hoping he will go easy on me when it comes to his compensation.
“You look so familiar,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “Ah, wait a minute.” His face lights up in recognition, and then it promptly slides into a frown. “That’s where I remember you. The funeral. You were Sasha’s best friend who gave a speech, right?”
I’m too dumbstruck to answer. Mr. Greenwood continues, “I’m so sorry for your loss. The Cades are such great people. I’m sure you miss her a lot.”
“You know the Cades?” My plan begins to fall apart the moment he nods.
“Oh sure. I’m very close with Walter Cade. We play golf together. Of course, he hasn’t been at the golf course since his daughter passed. Understandable.”
I don’t know what I was thinking by coming here. I thought I could keep Sasha’s last wish a secret like she’d asked me to. I thought I could save Elijah and no one would have to kno
w. But lawyers don’t exactly grow on trees, and they probably all know each other. Who doesn’t know the famous Walter Cade?
If I ask for Mr. Greenwood’s help, it’s sure to get back to Sasha’s dad, a slip of the tongue over drinks or a round of golf at the country club. Mr. Cade would find out that his daughter’s best friend hired a lawyer to get a strange boy out of jail. He’d inquire about the boy. He’d discover the truth.
He’d find out about Sasha’s secret from someone who isn’t me.
I stand up, my chair gliding across the thin carpet. “I’m sorry, I can’t do this.”
“Is everything okay?” Mr. Greenwood asks.
I shake my head. Everything is not okay. But I’m not about to explain it.
“Sorry I wasted your time,” I say.
And then I get the hell out of there.
***
A chilly breeze dances through my hair and sends fallen leaves skidding all over the cemetery grounds. Some crash into headstones, where they pile up, but others make it all the way down to the water. My butt is freezing, my teeth chattering, as I sit on the mostly dead mound of grass that covers Sasha’s grave.
“Listen,” I say as I stare at her name etched into the bright white granite headstone. “Elijah needs my help. Actually, he needs your dad’s help. I understand why you want me to keep Elijah a secret, but I can’t do it anymore.”
I stare at the ground and try not to imagine the casket that’s buried six feet below. Sasha’s bones may lie beneath me, but her spirit is everywhere. I look up toward the sky, closing my eyes as another cold gust of air slams into my face. I’ve never been one to stand up for myself, especially without Sasha by my side. Maybe I just didn’t have the right motivation until now.
“I’m not here to ask permission, Sasha. I have to spend the rest of my life making decisions without you, and this is the first one. Elijah spent twenty years missing out on knowing you. On knowing anything. I’m not going to let him spend five more years rotting in jail and missing out on more.”
I stand up and brush the dirt off the back of my dress pants. My teeth chatter from the cold, but there’s probably some apprehension mixed in as well. “I hope I have your permission,” I say as a lump rises in my throat.
“But if not … I hope you’ll forgive me.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
There is no time to come up with the perfect way to betray my best friend and tell her parents about their daughter’s last wish. And even if I had come up with a plan, if I’d worked up some epic speech to give them, I’d no doubt botch the entire thing.
With this in mind, I don’t even call Mrs. Cade to announce my unexpected visit. I just show up and knock on the door.
Mr. Cade answers. Instead of a hello, I say, “Good. You’re home.”
“Raquel?” When I give him a tight smile and walk right past him into his own house, he stares at me like I’ve lost my head. “Is everything okay?”
“No, sir. Everything is not okay. Where’s Mrs. Cade?”
“I’m right here, hon.” Sasha’s mom appears on the other side of the foyer, patting her hands dry on her apron. She gives me a once-over, maybe checking for bullet holes or black eyes, and then her gaze settles on my thumb picking the nail polish from my index finger. “What’s going on?”
“I need to tell you something,” I say, turning to Mr. Cade. “And I need your legal services. Pro bono, if possible.”
If I’d had a plan, maybe that wouldn’t have sounded so insane.
“Why don’t we sit in the den,” Mr. Cade says, ushering us into the adjoining room. As soon as they’re seated on a high-backed antique couch, I take a deep breath that does nothing to settle my nerves and sit in the chair across from them.
“Sasha has a biological brother.” I study my chipped nail polish, giving them a moment to react to the news they technically already know.
Mr. Cade clears his throat, and I hold up a hand, cringing at how rude I’m being to the wealthiest and most dignified man I know. “Please. Just let me get this out before you say anything.”
Nerves twist my stomach into knots, but I stay strong, for her. “Sasha found her brother a few months before she died. They talked online but she never met him in person. She saved that for me. We’ve been going around doing these little adventures for Sasha so that he can learn about her life and about who she was before she got cancer.”
I turn to Sasha’s parents, who are watching me with identical expressions.
“What’s his name?” Mrs. Cade says, wiping a tear from her eye.
“Elijah Delgado.”
They exchange a glance, one that I guess only makes sense when you’ve been married to the same person for twenty-five years.
Mr. Cade clears his throat. “Why do you need legal help?”
I want to look away, but I need to be confident. “Elijah is in jail, but it’s not his fault.” I swallow. “He was never adopted, and he aged out of the system. He had absolutely nothing, and because of that, he went to live with some guys he met. They happened to be drug dealers, but he didn’t have anything to do with the drugs. Now he’s in jail because of it, and his public defender doesn’t give a crap about him. He’s looking at five years for something he didn’t even do.”
Again, they exchange a look, only this time I see something like regret in their eyes. Sasha’s mom covers her face with her hands, her weeping growing louder until Mr. Cade wraps his arms around her. He strokes his wife’s hair, and I look away, allowing them a private moment.
“Walter, we should have done something,” she says.
“There was nothing we could do.” He shakes his head. “It would have been a legal nightmare. We didn’t want that, remember? We wanted a closed, drama-free adoption.”
Mrs. Cade dabs at her face with the bottom of her apron, and then she turns to me. “We knew about him. He went into the same agency a few months after Sasha did, but it was by court order, not by choice. His dad kept fighting to keep him, even though his mother wanted to surrender him at the same time she surrendered Sasha. About a year after we adopted Sasha, they called us and said her biological mother had died from an overdose and the biological father had lost temporary custody again and was looking at jail time for drug use. But he wanted an open adoption.”
I watch her so intently I forget to breathe. I see the pain in her eyes, the regret notched in her forehead. Her gaze drifts downward, and she presses her hand flat to her chest. “We said no. Walter was a new attorney and we weren’t well off back then. Adopting Sasha drained all the money we had at the time. We couldn’t afford the paperwork for another child and” — she exhales forcefully — “we knew we didn’t want an open adoption. We also didn’t want someone who was an addict in our child’s life, and the boy — Elijah — he was already a toddler. He wanted his dad more than adopted parents, and we didn’t want to risk losing him and then Sasha to the allure of their real father.”
“We looked for him a few years later, thinking maybe we could get the kids together for a playdate,” Mr. Cade says. “But when I found him, he was in a group home. Not even ten years old, and already suspended from school for smoking pot with a few junior high kids.” His lips were pressed together, his jaw tight. “It’s a shame, it really is, but we couldn’t have someone like that around Sasha. For all we knew, he was on the same path as his dad.”
Mrs. Cade can’t even look me in the eyes. She runs her fingers across an embroidered rose on her apron. “I felt awful, Raquel. I really did. But I didn’t want to share my daughter with someone who didn’t even want her. And taking in another child we couldn’t afford when we knew his history was just too big a risk.”
Here’s the thing about hearts: they can hurt even when they’re already broken. “Please,” I say, fingernails digging into my palms. My chest feels like it’s been ripped wide open, and all they’re doing
is offering me a bunch of excuses. “Please help him. He’s not a criminal. He’s not using or dealing drugs. He doesn’t even remember his dad.”
“Raquel,” Mr. Cade says, his voice deep and authoritative. I flinch, almost expecting to get chewed out. Mr. Cade stands, so I do, too. He puts a hand on my shoulder, and a few seconds too late, I realize he’s in lawyer mode. He peers down at me, the fine lines etched around his lips from years of working around the clock. “You should let this go. A kid like him probably can’t be helped, no matter how much you might wish otherwise.”
The words sting worse than they should, because I know they’re all untrue. Maybe he’s still bitter from losing his daughter, and that’s why he’s refusing to help me. I don’t know what’s changed, what’s happened to the Mr. Cade I’ve known most of my life. But after seeing Sasha’s last video, I guess it’s officially true: the man before me isn’t who I thought he was.
Chapter Thirty
Jarrah places a slice of coffee cake in front of me. It’s still warm from the oven, and the smell should make my mouth water. On any other day, I’d be shoveling the whole thing into my mouth, but today, I can’t stop staring at the pathetically small pile of cash on the Thanksgiving tablecloth.
I pick up my fork and poke at the cake. “Do judges negotiate bail, by any chance?”
Mr. Reinhart stares at the money. Thirteen hundred and forty-two dollars. He’s also holding his fork midair, also not eating. I notice his missing pinky, wonder what happened to it, but I know it’s not the time to ask. This measly stack of green is all the two of us could come up with in the last five days.
“I think,” he says, reaching over and taking some bills off the stack of cash, “bail isn’t the problem here.” He slides my three hundred and forty-two dollars across the table to me. “Even if he gets out, it’d only be for a little while, until the court date. And then what happens? He gets thrown back in jail?”
The Last Wish of Sasha Cade Page 21
