The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  “No,” she said firmly.

  Jack blinked at her. “I’m sorry?”

  “You should be. Lying to me, like that. For God’s sake, Jack, if you really wanted to end things between us, you should have used an excuse I might actually have believed. Like . . . you aren’t good enough for me. Or that you didn’t want me to suffer along with you. But to tell me you aren’t in love with me . . . well, that’s just something I don’t buy.”

  She leaned forward, her words aimed right at his heart. “You love me. You do. And goddammit, I’m tired of having the people who love me leave before I’m ready for them to go. It is not going to happen again.” She stood up, anger and determination hanging from her shoulders like the mantle of a queen. Then she walked toward the door where a guard stood posted, leaving Jack to suffer the sucker punch of being abandoned.

  “If you don’t get to sleep,” Selena said, “you’re not going to be of any use tomorrow.”

  Two in the morning, and they lay side by side in bed, staring at the ceiling. “I know,” Jordan admitted.

  “You’re all knots.” She came up on an elbow. “Although that seems impossible, after what we just did.”

  “I can’t help it. I keep hearing Houlihan reading the goddamn conviction.”

  Selena thought for a moment. “Then I’ll make you think of something else.”

  “Selena, I’m forty-two. You’re gonna kill me.”

  “Get your mind out of the gutter, McAfee.” She sat up cross-legged, drawing the sheet around her like a medicine man’s shawl. “So this guy gets sued because his mailman slips and breaks his pinky on a icy patch of his driveway. Two days later, the guy’s wife sends a threatening letter, via her divorce attorney. He gets so fed up with lawyers that he goes to a bar to drink away his sorrows.”

  “Now that,” Jordan interrupted, “sounds promising.”

  “Ten shots of tequila, and he’s drunk as a skunk. He gets up on top of the bar and shouts at the top of his lungs, ‘All lawyers are assholes!’”

  “Excellent. And this is supposed to relax me why?”

  Selena ignored him. “A man on the other end of the bar yells, ‘Hey! Watch your mouth.’ And the drunk guy sneers and says, “Oh? Are you a lawyer?’”

  Jordan finished the joke. “ ‘No. I’m an asshole.’”

  Selena looked crushed. “You’ve heard it before.”

  “Honey, I could have written it.” He sighed. “I need to get a nice, relaxing job. Maybe there’s an opening for an IRA operative.”

  “You ought to try working for this lawyer I know,” Selena said.

  Jordan smiled. “You gonna sue me for sexual harrassment?”

  “I don’t know. Are you gonna sue me?”

  “I can think of better things to do with you,” Jordan murmured, but when she expected him to reach for her, he simply turned away.

  Selena leaned over him, her braids brushing his shoulder. “Jordan?”

  He caught her hand, wishing it could be just that easy to hold to the rest of her. “Are you going to leave me again, Selena?”

  “Are you going to smother me again, Jordan?”

  “I asked you to marry me. I didn’t realize that was a criminal act.”

  “Jordan, you didn’t want to marry me. You were still reeling after the Harte case. And I was the closest thing to grab onto.”

  “Don’t tell me what I wanted. I know what I wanted. You. I still do.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re smart and you’re gorgeous and you’re the only woman I know of who would tell a defense attorney a really shitty lawyer joke at two A.M.” His grip on her wrist tightened. “Because you make me believe that there are things worth fighting for.”

  “Sleeping with me might make you a happier attorney, Jordan, but it doesn’t make you work any harder for your clients.” She shook her head. “You’ve always tangled up your work and your life. And you’ve made me do it, too.”

  “Stay with me, Selena. I’m asking you now, so that you know it has nothing to do with the outcome of this case.”

  “Maybe it should,” she said lightly, trying to joke her way out of this. “Maybe we should ask the jury to decide, since you and I don’t seem to be very good at it.”

  “Juries hand down wrong decisions every day.”

  She stared at him. “Are they going to be wrong this time?”

  Jordan didn’t know if she was talking about the verdict for Jack St. Bride or for their own relationship. He lifted her hand and brushed his lips over her knuckles, a promise. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  By three o’clock in the morning, Gillian not only had counted 75,000 sheep but she’d moved onto other barnyard animals for diversity. Time passed exceedingly slow, each second melting. But then, she had reason to be anxious. In six hours, court would reconvene, and Jack St. Bride’s attorney would have a chance to unravel all the work that the prosecutor had done.

  She had tossed and turned so much that the covers were knotted. Sighing, she threw back the blanket and let the air cool her skin. At the sound of a footstep in the hall, she froze.

  The light went on, and Gillian curled her hands into fists. The sound of running water, another creak. Very gently, very quietly, she reached down and drew up the quilt, a tight cocoon.

  By the time her father opened her door, Gillian had turned to her side, pretending to be asleep. She felt the floor tremble as he crossed the room, sat on the edge of her bed. His hand fell like a prayer on her temple. “My baby,” he whispered, the pain in his voice rocking her.

  Gillian didn’t move. She kept her breathing steady, even when a tear slid between her father’s hand and her own cheek, as binding as glue.

  Sad to say, the high point of Thomas’s day was getting the mail. It wasn’t even that he ever expected to get anything—well, the occasional solicitation for a credit card and some goddamned Boy Scouting magazine that he’d canceled when he was twelve but that had managed to follow him from address to address like a beleaguered ghost. But when you were fifteen and had to pick a daily peak experience from, oh, eating stale cereal for breakfast, reading assigned novels for next year’s English class, and strolling out to get the mail, this won hands down.

  Jordan McAfee, c/o Thomas McAfee.

  The package was light and bulky and reminded him too much of a dead mouse that had been sent in the mail by the brother of a Mafia client of his father’s who had been convicted. With trepidation, Thomas unsealed one end and shook a small notebook into his hands.

  He frowned at it. A black-and-white composition book was no big deal. But this one was wrapped like a birthday gift in a glittery silver ribbon. On its front were the words Book of Shadows. Thomas untied the bow and let the notebook fall open. How to Bring Money to You. Love Spell #35. The entries were arranged like the insides of a cookbook—ingredients, followed by directions. They were lettered by hand, but the writing varied, as if many different contributors had worked on it. In the margins were small notes and funny faces, like the ones he made in his history binder when he was bored.

  A longer entry: Imbolc, 1999. This one looked like a play written for four actors, with lines for each player. But the things they were saying, doing . . . it was like nothing he’d ever seen before. Brows drawing together, Thomas began to read.

  “So you understand how important your answers are,” Jordan murmured, nervously regarding the woman at his side. With her wild silver hair and rope sandals, her silver bangles and swinging earrings, she seemed a little offbeat—more the kind of person you’d expect to find beside you at a Grateful Dead concert than telling you truths from the witness stand.

  “Completely, Mr. McAfee,” Starshine said. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small blue bag tied with purple thread. “Would you give this to your client?”

  “Jack? What is it?”

  “A charm, of sorts. Just some bay laurel, High-John-the-Conqueror root, St.-John’s-wort, and vervain. Oh, a littl