Call Me Copy Girl One More Time Chapter 06

Call Me Copy Girl One More Time Chapter 06: The Name I Buried

Jules cornered me in the stairwell at seven that night.

“Do you understand what she’s doing?” she hissed. “That audit is aimed at exactly one person. She’s going to pull your file, find the holes, and get you fired for falsifying an employment history. That’s not a warning, Tess, that’s a police report.”

“I know.”

“Then tell them the truth!”

“And what’s the truth, Jules?”

She stopped.

I sat down on the concrete step, and for the first time in three years I said it out loud.

“My name is Tess Calloway.”

Jules’s face did something complicated.

“…Calloway like-”

“Like the Cross. Yes.”

“Like the-” she sat down hard. “Tess. Tess. They teach you in law school.”

“They shouldn’t.”

“Why would you-” She grabbed my wrist. “Why the basement?”

So I told her.

Red Hook. The bar. The 1:40 a.m. call from the precinct. Walking into the holding cell and seeing my baby brother’s face and knowing before anyone said anything that the other kid – the one who actually threw the

punch – had already lawyered up and pointed at Danny.

He said, “Tess. Don’t let them give me a stranger. I want you.”

I said, “I can’t be objective.”

He said, “You’re the only one who’s ever fought for me.”

So I did.

Eleven days. I have gone over that transcript four hundred times and I did everything right, and the jury st took four hours, because sometimes twelve people look at a scared kid from the wrong zip code and decide before the first witness sits down.

I hugged him at the defense table while the marshals waited. I washed my face in a courthouse bathroom..

And I understood something I could not un-understand. every skill I had, I’d sharpened on his behalf. The prep sessions at our kitchen table. The mock crosses where he played the witness. The Calloway Cross had my

brother’s fingerprints all over it.

Which meant every time I stood up in a courtroom for the rest of my life, I’d be standing next to him.

So I stopped.

Fourteen months later he was dead on a laundry room floor, and the state offered four million dollars for its

failure to protect him. I refused it. I told his lawyer, Mr. Abel, to give it away and stop calling.

Then I found a law firm across the river where nobody knew my face, and I took a job stamping paper in a

room with no windows.

Jules was crying. I wasn’t.

“Tess,” she said. “You’ve been down here punishing yourself.”

“I’ve been down here resting.”

“That’s not what rest looks like.”

I got back to my locker at 9 p.m.

The lock was hanging open.

Inside: my coat, my thermos, and a battered blue hardcover I’d kept for reasons I’d never let myself examine.

Cross-Examination of Forensic Experts, 2nd edition.

Contributing author photograph, page ix. A twenty-six-year-old woman with better hair, in a black suit, smiling like the world was a thing you could argue with.

M. Calloway, Esq.
The book was sitting on top of my coat.

It had been at the bottom of the locker for three years.

Chapter 6: The Name I Buried

There was a sticky note on the cover in violet ink.

Interesting hobby, copy girl.

My phone buzzed in my hand.

Unknown number.

COLE ASHFORD: Eli is home. He asked for “the lady with the date stamp.”

COLE ASHFORD: Also my team just pulled every transcript by T. M. Calloway.

COLE ASHFORD: Page ix of the second edition, Ms. Calloway.

COLE ASHFORD: Now come upstairs. Because in forty-eight hours you’re going to lose your job, and I’m the

only person in this building who can stop it – and I want something in return.