“Sheba! Martha!” All the good press had somehow managed to increase the judge’s vocal capacity. The building shook.

In the third week of June, Justice Linda Adams, along with her law clerks, moved to Washington. She’d been confirmed by a wide margin in the Senate.

Mayor Adams’s campaign assumed full responsibility for its “negligent oversight” and “faulty donor reporting,” thereby absolving Linda Adams of any appearance of wrongdoing (and killing Joe Adams’s chances of running for governor one day). As it was, her belated recusal from the Nelson case at once silenced the press on her alleged insensitivity and started her confirmation hearings. Remarkably, Friedman’s quest to derail Adams’s nomination gave Dell a second chance at life and ensured Adams’s life tenure on the Supreme Court. Talk about twisted fate.

Adams asked her current clerks to stay on for her first year on the Supreme Court, proving that that best things do happen to the worst people. While I was happy for Kevin, it made my skin crawl to think that Betsy would be penning the law of the land. Even worse was that Brian had scored a clerkship with Justice Breyer. The grand finale was that after completing their clerkships, Betsy and Brian would both be recruited to become managing partners at a law firm, teach at Yale, perhaps govern a Baltic state. Former Supreme Court law clerks ran the world.

It didn’t help that Bob died two weeks after Justice Adams’s promotion. I’d been praying (and even lit a candle) that he’d last another month, until I was safely back in New York and one of the judge’s new maids was sitting in my cubicle. Funny—almost a year earlier, I’d found myself haggling on the phone with her former law clerks, the folks I’d labeled as “jerks” for not staying an extra week so that I could enjoy one measly week of vacation after the bar exam, before the clerkship. Now I understood.

Yoko Oshima from Stanford, my replacement for the upcoming year, had called a few months back asking me the same thing. I told her pointblank that I’d be out of there on the first of August. Could I stay an extra week so she could “decompress” after the bar exam? No, sorry. What about a few days so she could drive and not fly from Palo Alto to Philadelphia? Sorry, not possible. I could only imagine what she had to say about me to her friends on the West Coast.

My name would be cleared soon enough. Next year, Stanford Yoko would be pulling the same shit with the judge’s next pack of chambermaids. That is, if she didn’t quit first. But at least she and her coclerks wouldn’t have to deal with the biggest three-ring circus of all: SHIVAH.