Her dad did his best. She didn’t know if that was true. Concerned friends and a series of judges told her often enough that she’d internalized the phrase. He worked hard at his manufacturing job until his choices about spending money on household expenses over insulin caught up with him. He died while she was in college. She grieved for a few weeks then never again.

Jessa didn’t realize the funeral service had ended until people started standing up and filing out of the room. She wanted to race down the aisle and sit in the car, but Covington didn’t move. He stood at the end of the pew, nodding to people he knew as they passed. The sudden choking sensation made her want to shove him out of the way and get to fresh air, but that wasn’t an option.

Gabby Fielding watched them as she walked out of the church with her brother-in-law on one side and her daughter on the other. Jessa could feel the weight of her hatred. Gabby aimed all that loathing at them as she walked away. She’d clearly marked them as the enemy, and the loss of life didn’t change that.

A few more minutes of uncomfortable shifting and stifled conversation with the other mourners, and Jessa broke free. She gulped in hot air as she stepped outside and into the sunshine.

“Did Baines leave an unpaid legal bill? If so, you can scurry along because I’m not paying it.”

Jessa recognized the sarcastic slap of a voice before she turned around. She skipped the pleasantries and any fake attempts to pretend they didn’t know each other. “Gabby, I’m truly sorry for your loss.”

“How publicly decent of you.”

Jessa had expected a chill. This was more like an ice storm.

“Are we friends again?” Gabby asked.

Were they ever really friends? Law school classmates years ago at George Washington. People who knew some of the same people. Not close, and that distance widened when Jessa’s firm took on Gabby’s ex, the deceased Baines, as a client in his divorce.

Gabby had fought her then-husband’s choice in representation, insisting there was a conflict. At first, she claimed Baines had purposely met with most of the best family lawyers in the metro area to conflict them out and keep Gabby from retaining them. She wasn’t wrong. Baines, like many other people in the middle of a contentious divorce proceedings, had deployed that strategy, and the court had let him do it. When Gabby then argued that the law school connection to Jessa conflicted out Covington and the entire firm from representing Baines, she lost. Again.

Jessa tried to find the right words to cut through the mess piled between them and realized there weren’t any. “I know the divorce was—”

“Save it.” Gabby leaned in. “You’ve done your duty and played the good soldier. You can leave now.”