Call Me Copy Girl One More Time Chapter 11

Call Me Copy Girl One More Time Chapter 11: Thursday

The hearing room had nineteen people in it.

Harlan. General Counsel. The compliance officer. Three members of the executive committee. Bar counsel, observing. Sloane, with a lawyer.

And in the back row, in a black suit, silent as a loaded gun: Cole Ashford.

“Ms. Calloway,” the compliance officer said. “You’ve submitted materials.”

“I have.”

I stood up.

“Exhibit one. The document produced by this firm as my bar status record. Note the file metadata, page four of your packet. Created eleven-forty-two p.m., March eighteenth. Modified twice within nine minutes.

Workstation 30-North-12.”

“That proves nothing,” Sloane’s lawyer said.

“Exhibit two. The badge authentication log for Workstation 30-North-12 at eleven-forty-one p.m. that night. Badge 0441.” I looked up. “Ms. Whitaker, is that your badge number?”

Sloane said nothing.

“Exhibit three. My actual dues payment confirmation, emailed to me by the state bar on January ninth, with server headers, plus a signed letter from the bar’s membership director received yesterday confirming my status was active active on the day of the Ashford bail hearing. Their record and your record don’t match. Only one of them has been edited from inside this building.”

The room shifted.

“Exhibit four. The Courtroom 4B reassignment made the night before the Ashford trial. Same badge. Same

terminal. Twelve minutes earlier.”

Harlan’s face was the color of paper.

“And exhibit five,” I said. “Which I did not want to file.”

I set the last folder on the table.

“Seventeen reimbursement claims. Filed by Ms. Whitaker. Approved and countersigned by Mr. Harlan, who also chaired the committee that made her partner, out of cycle, twice.” I pushed it forward. “I’m not filing this to humiliate anyone. I’m filing it because this committee needs to know whether the people accusing me have a

Chapter 11 Thursday

credibility problem before it hands my name to the bar.”

The silence lasted a long, long time.

Then one of the committee members said, very quietly, “Richard. Would you like to respond?”

He didn’t.

That was the response.

They asked us to step out.

They called us back in nineteen minutes.

Sloane Whitaker: partnership terminated, effective immediately, with a mandatory referral to the state bar.for tampering with a licensing record.

Richard Harlan: resignation as managing partner “accepted,” effective end of month.

Me: suspension vacated. Full reinstatement. A written apology from the firm, which I have never once read.

Sloane walked past me on her way out.

She stopped.

“You know what the worst part is?” she said, and she wasn’t performing anymore; she just looked forty and exhausted. “You were fixing my briefs for three years. Forty times. So I never found out what I actually was. And now I have to find out with no one underneath me.”

“Sloane-”

“Don’t be kind to me,” she said. “I couldn’t stand it.”

And she left.

Cole was waiting in the corridor.

“You didn’t need me,” he said.

“No.”

“You didn’t even look at me once.”

“I know.”

“I liked it,” he said. “Very much. Which is an alarming thing to discover about yourself at thirty-four.”

Haughed – an actual laugh, the first in what felt like a decade – and then I put my hand over my mouth because it came out sounding like crying.

He didn’t touch me. He just waited.

“There’s something I have to do,” I said. “And I don’t want to do it alone.”

“Name it.”

“There’s a letter,” I said. “My brother wrote me a letter from inside. I told his lawyer to burn it.

“Did he?”

“Mr. Abel has been calling me every eleven weeks for three years,” I said. “Nobody calls that many times

about ashes.”