Page 7 of A Walking Shadow

“These are piled up to the sky,” Sasha said, trying to lighten the mood.

She failed.

Fiona pointed a fork at her. “You need to see your doctor, Mom.”

“I’m not sick, honey. I’m just tired.”

“Then you need an earlier bedtime,” Finn told her. “No screens after dinner.”

“Hoisted by your own petard,” Leo chuckled.

She glared at him. “Hope you don’t get any syrup on your tie.”

“That sounded more like a curse than a hope,” he said with an easy grin, flipping the tie over his shoulder and digging into his breakfast.

The twins giggled, and she smiled. The banter and familiar domestic routine soothed her heart. But she knew it was only temporary. Moments of happiness and joy like these had been increasingly fleeting in recent months. She added this fact to the growing list of things to worry about later and raised her coffee mug to her lips.

5

Sasha bypassed Jake’s coffee shop in the lobby and jogged up the stairs to the second floor. She let out a relieved sigh when she emerged into a dim corridor. The offices of McCandless, Volmer & Andrews were empty, which meant nobody would ask her why she was running late or whether something was wrong.

She stopped at the lobby doors and reached into her oversized bag to fish out her key card. Behind her, a floorboard creaked. The hair on her nape rose. A wave of adrenaline rushed through her, just as it had the previous night.

She dropped the card back into the tote, let the bag fall to the floor with a thud, and whipped around, shifting her coffee mug from her dominant to non-dominant hand in one smooth motion. The liquid inside was hot enough to slow down an attacker if she splashed it in their eyes, but she wanted to leave her left hand free in case she could land a clean punch. Her brain synapses fired these messages, fast and clear, and the fog that she’d been under lifted.

She faced … a dark, empty hallway. There were no motion sensors here. The light switch was on the wall on the other sideof the locked lobby doors—a fact that had never bothered her until now. Her gaze shifted to the door at the end of the corridor, which swung gently on its hinge.

She might be alone now, but she hadn’t been a moment ago. As she stepped toward the doorway, the groaning elevator approached. It shuddered to a stop and sounded its chime. Then the doors parted, and Caroline Masters, the firm administrator, stepped off the car.

“Sasha, good morn—. What’s wrong?”

“Did you see anyone on the ground floor while you were waiting for the elevator?”

Caroline frowned. “Of course. There’s a line out the door at Jake’s.”

“Anybody else? Somebody headed for the stairwell, maybe.”

The older woman’s gaze shifted to the door at the end of the hallway for a moment. “No. Why?”

Sasha shook her head and mustered up a smile. “No reason. It must’ve been my imagination.”

She felt Caroline watching her as she grabbed her bag and waved her card in front of the reader. Caroline trailed her inside and flipped on the hall lights. Sasha kept moving.

“Please ask Eleanor to come see me when she gets in,” she said over her shoulder.

“Certainly. Let me know if you need anything in the meantime.”

“Thanks, I will.” She pretended not to hear the unasked question in Caroline’s voice as she hurried down the hall to let herself into her office.

Therehadbeen someone behind her. She knew it in her bones. She’d heard the creak. Felt the warning tingle on the back of her neck. Seen the door swinging in the would-be intruder’s wake. But whoever they were, and whatever they wanted, they weren’t here now. And she had work to do.

She put the incident in the hallway firmly out of her mind, booted up her laptop, and passed the time until Ellie arrived at the office scrolling through articles about Citizens to End Oppression and other modern offshoots of the original sovereign citizen movement. This, at least, was a useful task in contrast to her efforts the previous night to wade through the circular reasoning and complete fantasies that populated the complaint Gray Simmons had filed.

During her summer clerkship after her first year of law school, her judge had marveled at the innovative twists that pro se litigants came up with. As the sucker charged with making sense of the arguments, applying the law, and drafting decisions that treated them seriously, she’d been less impressed. The pleadings were sometimes utterly divorced from reality. But the most bananas argument she’d encountered had nothing on Gray Simmons’ pleading. She had no idea how to begin to respond to the fantastical interpretations of the Constitution and statutes he’d set forth in the complaint. The thought of trying made her head throb.

A light rap on her door interrupted her deep dive. She raised her head to see Eleanor Prescott smiling at her from the doorway.

“Caroline said you wanted to see me,” Ellie said.

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