Not thirty seconds later is Chanelle essentially on top of her, frosty and commanding, her typical traits even more exacerbated by the anxiety of the day.

Caroline tucks away any thoughts about Hannah or Abbie or Halloween as she gets to work calming Chanelle – it’s showtime.

On the plus side, the information Caroline had private investigators spend months working to dig up on Shawn Barclay – Chanelle’s NFL playing husband – comes to light and proves very useful. Mostly in that his lawyers know that when they go to court, they aren’t going to get close to what he’s demanding. That’s not even before she comes forward with the medical records she’d finally gotten released from ex-girlfriends of Barclay’s that corroborate Chanelle’s own abuse records, cementing his history.

And the clincher – his own mistress discussing their proclivities. Sometimes, people really did have the ability to be swayed when given what they believed to be a sympathetic shoulder.

“I’ll leave you with the deal my client originally offered in terms of financial supports, asset division, and custody. You might find, now, that it’s more than fair.”

On the negative side, Shawn is over two hundred pounds of pure muscle and it’s in that moment, as Caroline leans forward to reach into her briefcase, he literally flips the mahogany table.

Chaos erupts in the room and she doesn’t have time to scramble back from the impact, only able to raise her arm up to protect her face in the seconds she does have.

It’s not nearly enough, and her face feels like it’s exploding as she blinks up at the ceiling in a daze, the shouting in the room muffled to her ears. It’s all she remembers before she’s at the hospital.

***

A sprained wrist and a nasal fracture, accompanied by the physical manifestation of some pretty awful facial bruising, and four hours later, Caroline is sprawled out on her couch. Still wearing the same suit she’d worn all day, she wakes up from a nap, her head still pounding with the world’s worst headache.

She should change, she thinks dimly, since her blood – broken noses really do bleed like a bitch – is soaked into her shirt, plus it smells like… hospital.

But they’d given her Vicodin before she’d been discharged and Caroline has never done well with pain meds. Namely, they make her head feel fuzzy and the world move a little slower. Chanelle had dispatched one of her personal drivers to take Caroline home, in an unexpected but appreciated twist, and once the driver had helped Caroline up to her door, she’d promptly dropped onto her couch and completely passed out.

She blinks blearily when she hears a pounding on her door – that must have been what woke her up in the first place.