It was a low-key firm. All the lawyers were friends, each of them helping the others. There was no shortage of clients, but that hadn’t always been the case. At one point the firm had struggled to keep its head above water, but that all changed when the Vigilantes were captured and then escaped. The media had a field day as they splashed the news that the Quinn Law Firm’s owner was one of the notorious women. Within twenty-four hours, there were waiting lines of women—some men, too—forming up outside to be represented by the now-prestigious, outrageous, famous law firm.

Nancy Barnes, the firm’s business manager, was new to the firm but not that new. She’d replaced her aunt Maddy, who had retired to stop and smell the roses a year after the Vigilantes had gone on the run. She knew the firm inside and out, having worked there summers and holidays for as long as she could remember. She herself was a paralegal but had found out that management was more to her liking. She had a wonderful rapport with the lawyers and clients. At Christmas time alone she had to have a friend come by with a pickup truck to take all her presents home: gifts from the lawyers, gifts from all the grateful clients.

Nancy Barnes loved her job.

On the first day of October, Nancy was huffing and puffing as she struggled with an oversize pumpkin that she somehow managed to get into the lobby after she opened the door and turned off the alarm without dropping the pumpkin. She knew by the end of the week there would be about twenty more pumpkins around her scarecrow-and-hay arrangement, all brought in by the lawyers themselves, along with the paralegals and the secretaries.

Cozy. A feel-good place to come to when in trouble.

Nancy looked up to see a young woman coming through the door. Her first thought was that she looked like a deer caught in the headlights. Fragile. Scared. But there was a spark of something she couldn’t quite define. Yet.

Nancy Barnes was a chunky young woman who wore sensible shoes. She had curly hair, unruly curly hair, and a bridge of freckles danced across her nose and rosy cheeks. She wore granny glasses and always had two or three pencils stuck behind her ears or in her hair. It was her smile that put new clients at ease, or maybe it was her first words of greeting, no one was ever quite sure. “Good morning. What can I do to help you?”

“I’m Rachel Dawson, and I need to talk to a lawyer as soon as possible. I don’t have an appointment. I’m sorry. I just…What I did was…My husband doesn’t know I’m here. I can’t afford to be here.” The woman flapped her arms and then said, “But here I am.”