Call Me Copy Girl One More Time Chapter 01

Call Me Copy Girl One More Time Chapter 01: Copy Girl

I make photocopies for twenty-nine thousand dollars a year.

I let a partner call me “copy girl” every single morning.

I’ve never told anyone in this building my real name.

Because eight years ago, I was the youngest attorney in the country to win a capital murder acquittal.

Three years ago, my little brother went to prison on my watch, and came out in a box.

And today, the woman who humiliates me is about to put a nineteen-year-old boy away for life.

I’m the only person in this city who knows how to stop it.

My badge says TESS ROWAN — RECORDS & DUPLICATION, CLERK II.

Sub-basement. No windows. A copier that smells like burnt toast and a ceiling that hums.

I scan depositions, bind exhibit books, stamp Bates numbers, and send it all up the elevator to people who will never learn my face.

Three years of this. On purpose.

“Rowan.”

Sloane Whitaker doesn’t walk into a room. She arrives, like a verdict.

Thirty-six. Head of Trial Practice at Harlan Pierce. Made equity partner in three years, which is not a thing that happens to normal people.

“My exhibit binder for the Delgado deposition had a tab out of order,” she said.

“Tab fourteen was in the order your associate emailed. I logged it.”

“Did I ask for your opinion?” She smiled the way people smile when they want witnesses. Two associates hovered behind her. “You’re a clerk, Rowan. You touch paper. Lawyers touch juries. Try to remember the difference.”

“Yes, Ms. Whitaker.”

“And bring the Ashford binders to the thirtieth-floor conference room at nine. Coffee too. Black.”

She walked off.

Behind her, one associate whispered, “God, she’s brutal.”

The other whispered back, “Yeah, but she’s not wrong. Rowan’s been down here for years. Nobody stays down here unless there’s nothing else in them.”

I kept stamping.

They weren’t wrong either. There is nothing else in me.

There used to be.

Here’s what nobody at Harlan Pierce knows.

My name isn’t Rowan. Rowan was my mother’s maiden name.

My name is Tess Calloway.

At twenty-four, I was the youngest attorney ever to argue before the state supreme court.

At twenty-six, I had thirty-one jury trials, twenty-nine acquittals, and a cross-examination technique law schools still teach under my name. The Calloway Cross. There’s a chapter about it in a textbook with my photograph on page ix.

At twenty-eight, my brother Danny got into a bar fight in Red Hook, and a man hit his head on a curb and died.

Danny was twenty-two. Danny didn’t throw the punch.

I was the only person he wanted at that table, so I sat there. Eleven days of trial. I did everything right.

The jury took four hours.

Fourteen months later, a guard called me at 4:39 a.m. to tell me my brother had bled out on a laundry room floor.

I walked out of the prison parking lot and never stood in front of a jury again.

I burned the name. I took the basement. Some people drink. I chose toner and fluorescent light.

At 8:50 I rolled the cart up to the thirtieth floor.

The hallway was different that morning. Polished. Nervous. Partners in suits that cost more than my rent.

Because Harlan Pierce was about to be bought a future.

Ashford Capital. Forty million dollars a year in legal work — if the man at the top liked what he saw.

And the man at the top was Cole Ashford. Thirty-four. Built a fortune before he could legally rent a car. Fired an entire legal team at Brennan Stahl last year for what he called “confident guessing.”

I set the coffee down and turned to leave.

That’s when I saw the file open on the table.

STATE v. ASHFORD, ELIJAH R. AGE 19.

Second-degree murder. Victim found in a rooftop hot tub after a party. Trial in five days.

Six firms had already told him to take the plea. Fifteen years.

And clipped to the front page was Sloane’s trial strategy, printed in her tidy font, initialed with her tidy little SW.

I read it in nine seconds.

Then I read it again, because my hands had gone cold and I didn’t trust them.

Alibi defense. The girlfriend on the stand. Eli on the stand. “Home by eleven-thirty.”

Exhibit 41 — buried, unflagged — was a cell tower report that put Eli’s phone at the party house until 12:20 a.m.

Which means the second Sloane put that boy on the stand and let him say eleven-thirty, the prosecutor would stand up, hold one page in the air, and turn him into a liar in front of twelve strangers.

He’d be convicted in under a day.

Sloane didn’t see it. Six firms before her hadn’t seen it.

I did, because they were all arguing about where Eli was at midnight.

Nobody was asking whether the victim was already dead at ten.

“Something interesting, copy girl?”

Sloane was in the doorway.

And behind her, in a charcoal suit, watching me with the flattest, coldest eyes I have ever seen on a human being, stood Cole Ashford.