“This won’t take long.” Then to Colin Nelson, she said, “My name is Lila Nash. I work for you.” She held out a hand, and a bewildered Nelson shook it. “I’m one of your new hires. Frank here’s my boss.”

“Ms. Nash,” Dovey said, “what are you doing?”

Lila ignored him. “Here’s the thing, Mr. Nelson. There’s a rumor going around the office that Beth Malone is retiring, and that you may be thinking about giving Frank her job. I’m here to tell you that that’s a terrible idea.” Lila’s pulse raced, but she spoke with the ease of a storyteller, her words flowing like fine cursive writing. She had been waiting for this moment for a long time and didn’t even know it.

“Have you lost your mind?” Dovey’s eyes popped with indignation, his words starting to jam up in his throat. “If you don’t leave this table…”

“You need to hear this, Mr. Nelson.”

“Of all the…”

“I just need three minutes of your time, and then I’ll leave.”

Dovey drew in a breath to continue, but Nelson held up a hand to stop him. Then he looked at Lila and said, “You work for me?”

“In Adult Prosecutions. I’ll be sworn in this fall, and whether or not I’ll still be working for you then…Well, that’s what this is all about.”

Nelson said, “Go ahead, Ms.…”

“Nash. Thank you, sir. You see, when I was in law school, I worked on a case with one of my professors, Boady Sanden, and we—”

“I know Professor Sanden quite well,” Nelson said. “We came up through the ranks together. A damned fine attorney.”

“I agree,” Lila said. “We had this case against Frank and…well, to put it bluntly, we kicked his ass. Rumor has it, he lost a judgeship as a result, and I think that’s why he’s been trying to push me out of my job.”

Again Dovey tried to interject. “Push you out—?”

Nelson lifted a finger to silence Dovey.

Lila continued. “Just the other day he cornered me alone on the elevator and told me that I didn’t belong here. But here’s the thing, Mr. Nelson, I do belong here. I’m damned good at this job.”

“You froze in court,” Dovey said. Then to Nelson, “She has emotional issues—significant ones.”

Lila shot Dovey a cold glare. “And how would you know about that, Frank?”

Dovey looked back and forth between Lila and Nelson, but didn’t answer.

She turned her attention back to Nelson and softened her tone. “When I was eighteen, I was raped by two men. It was…” She paused, not to wrestle with her emotions but to find the right word. Her hands remained calm and folded in front of her. Her voice held no quaver.

“Mr. Nelson, I honestly don’t think there’s a word in the English language that could tell you all that I went through. Those men took something from me that will never be replaced. The shame from something like that can be devastating. People look at you like it’s your fault. Hell, my own mother refused to acknowledge what happened to me, and when it became too much, I swallowed some of her pills.”