Ruth Finson was my only criminal client, and she was getting out on appeal. I was meeting her with the county people and her six-year-old daughter. Ruth had been convicted of narcotics manufacture in Montana two years earlier, and it had taken that long to convince the judge that the racket was her husband’s business, not hers—mostly because that wasn’t exactly true. During that time Ruth’s daughter had been growing up in foster care and starting school. Cort helped me with the case when the foster parents sued for custody, and we won. We made an odd team: Cort took everything to trial, and wrote briefs the night before they were due. He counted on other people’s laziness, their underestimation of him, their inability to handle their own disorganization as well as he handled his. I planned ahead, negotiated everything, hedged bets. I might not have taken the custody battle on my own, but by the time we went before the judge, I’d had enough of the foster parents’ self-righteousness and was grateful to Cort for his help.

I drove to Billings vowing to cut him more slack about his horses and to take more pro bono cases. Two self-improvement projects. But I knew they wouldn’t last. I couldn’t love the horses when they had my house in hock, and I needed all the working time I had.

It was the little girl’s sixth birthday, and I stopped at Safeway for a pink-frosted cake in case no one else had done anything. I guessed the foster parents would leave the celebration to the mother, and I knew Ruth couldn’t have made any preparations. When I got to the prison, the little girl was already waiting with a social worker. The foster parents hadn’t come, but they had dressed her in a way that suggested ownership: she wore a short, pleated turquoise skirt over turquoise tights and bright pink shoes. Someone had buttoned her pink sweater at the throat and put her hair in two pigtails that curled. She looked small and uncertain, and she came to sit by me in the orange plastic chairs in the waiting room. I didn’t know if she remembered me. The social worker watched us.

“Hi, kiddo,” I said.

The little girl grinned shyly. “You called me kiddo,” she said.

“Don’t you like that name?”

She considered. “It’s okay. My real name is Lauren.” The adult name from my files sounded old in her small voice.

“Lauren, then.”