Call Me Copy Girl One More Time Chapter 10

Call Me Copy Girl One More Time Chapter 10: The File Chapter 10: The File

Six days later, they suspended me.

I want to say I didn’t see it coming.

9:00 A.M. PARTNERSHIP DISCIPLINARY REVIEW. SUBJECT: CALLOWAY, T.M.

Boardroom. Harlan at the head of the table. Two people from General Counsel. One from Risk/Sloane, in gray, hands folded, sad as a funeral.

“Ms. Calloway,” Harlan said. “An anonymous complaint has been filed with the state bar alleging that on the day of the Ashford bail hearing, you appeared before a court while your license was administratively suspended for non-payment.”

“I paid my dues every year. Three years. I have the receipts.”

“Yes.” He slid a page across. “This is your bar status record.”

I looked at it.

SUSPENDED – NON-PAYMENT. Reinstated four days after the bail hearing.

“That’s not right,” I said.

“It came directly from the bar’s portal.”

“Then the portal is wrong, or somebody made it wrong. I have the payment confirmation-”

“We’d love to see it,” Sloane said gently.

And that’s when I understood what she’d actually done. Not a forgery. Something so much smarter.

She’d waited for me to be a lawyer again – because a clerk speaking out of turn is an HR problem, but an attorney appearing on a suspended license is unauthorized practice of law. Sanctions. Disbarment. Possible charges. And a motion to vacate everything I’d done in that courtroom.

And under §9.3, if I got suspended, Ashford’s forty million turned into a repayment demand overnight.

She wasn’t trying to hurt me.

She was trying to burn the whole building down and hand Harlan the match.

“There’s more,” Sloane said. “Ms. Calloway had a personal relationship with the client that she failed to disclose. There’s video of her embracing Cole Ashford in a courthouse corridor. It raises questions about

judgment, and frankly, about how she obtained first chair in the first place.”

“Get out,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“You sat in a gallery for four days and watched me keep a nineteen-year-old out of a cage, and then you got on the phone.” I stood up. “How long have you had that portal contact, Sloane? Since you clerked? Since Mr. Harlan started signing your conference reimbursements?”

Harlan’s head snapped up.

“Effective immediately,” he said, too loud, “Ms. Calloway is suspended pending investigation. Surrender your

badge.”

Jules was waiting in the stairwell.

“Give me your phone,” she said.

“Jules-”

“Phone.” She was shaking, and it wasn’t fear. “Tess, I run records. Do you know what records has? Everything.

Records has everything.”

She scrolled.

“One. That bar status PDF was uploaded to your personnel file with an edit timestamp. Somebody opened it in an editor at 11:42 p.m. on the eighteenth, from a workstation on thirty, badge-authenticated. Badge ends 0-4-4-1. That’s Whitaker.”

My chest went tight.

“Two. The courtroom reassignment request the night before trial. Same badge, same terminal, sent from the firm’s docketing account.”

“Jules-”

“Three.” She stopped scrolling and looked up. “Seventeen client development’ reimbursements over eighteen months for S. Whitaker, all countersigned by R. Harlan. Same hotel, ten minutes from here. Two of them on days there was no client in this state.”

I stared at the screen.

“I’ve had that for a year,” Jules said. “I never used it, because I’m a coward and I like having rent money. But they just tried to take your license.”

“This could end your career.”

“Then it ends my career.” She shoved the phone into my hands. “Hearing’s Thursday. Tess this time, don’t

dare stand against the wall.”