I wanted to please her. I wanted to turn the things she’d said about fairness into a story that would make her into the kind of person who would do right by me and my son.

But what if this feeling of communion were only in my head? If I could figure out who she was, what wrong she was trying to set right, then I should. In case things went wrong. In case I couldn’t get the pills down Spence, or she was lying, or she changed her mind.

Fairness. I turned the word over and over as I gave myself a smoky eye. Fairness was a thing people went to courtrooms to try to get, though Trey often joked that in his job cash trumped fairness every time. Was this about one of Trey and Spence’s lawsuits? Had Spence bent or broken a rule?

They’d worked together on so many cases, including the large, uneasy merger that had taken Trey off to Chicago. What had Trey said about it? This is not a marriage of equals we’re officiating. Our groom is a cannibal.

How many of their clients had been cannibals? Could I narrow it down?

I striped my lids in black liner, thinking. If this was about a case, she was not their client. A client could have simply made a date for drinks with Spence and doped him up herself. Also, she didn’t talk like someone who’d be a main player in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit. Her accent sounded like my mom’s. Like mine, before my college adviser told me, No one is going to cast a redneck Juliet, and registered me for dialect class.

She was from the small-town South, like me. Had her family been caught in the cross fire of something big and cold and corporate?

She was sick, she’d said. Was her daughter sick, too? Perhaps a client of Spence’s had done something with chemicals or food or the groundwater that had made them sick. Or perhaps she’d lost her job in some merger and with it the health insurance that could have cured whatever was now killing her.

I shook my head. It could be one of a hundred cases, some decades old. Without more details, all I could do was hope she’d taken Robert to get something concrete from Spence—information, a file, a taped admission of wrongdoing—because I could help her do that. I could drug him so he wouldn’t remember giving it to her. I could do it for Robert.

“Will the drug hurt Spence? Three seems like a lot.” I was afraid to question her, but I didn’t want to harm Spence.