The Burden of Desire. Natalie Charles

with you on the investigation side, but I want that analysis to be completely independent, got it?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      Ben smiled to himself after Jack left the room. He’d upheld his end of the bargain, and now Sally had to uphold hers. Wouldn’t she be pleased.

      * * *

      “He came in and interrupted us. He actually walked right into my office as if we were standing in the hallway, and said he would review the files. He was so smug about it, too. You would’ve thought he was a knight in shining armor!” Sally punctuated her statement with a fork and then viciously speared a ketchup-soaked French fry on her plate. “Of course Jack agreed because, what, like he has any free time these days to review my files.”

      Tessa took a sip of seltzer water from her straw and nodded at Sally’s plate. “Can we talk about how you’re the only person I know who eats French fries with a fork and knife?”

      “How am I going to get through this, Tessa?” Sally continued, her eyes beginning to sting. She rested her fork on her plate. “I’ve worked harder on this case than any other. I thought I was doing everything right. And now?” She swallowed the tight knot that had worked its way into her throat. “I could lose my job.”

      “Oh, honey.” Her friend leaned forward to grasp her hand. “I promise you won’t lose your job. You’re too damn good at it. Besides, we all have those loser cases, the ones we take a chance on, only to come up short.”

      Tessa was being generous. She was one of the most skilled attorneys in the office and a genius with juries. Sally had been partnered with her a few times and had witnessed firsthand the way Tessa could read a jury, predicting which members would form a friendship, and knowing instinctively how to win them over. She was such a brilliant advocate that she routinely gave lectures to organizations in the Connecticut bar about jury psychology. Did she lose cases? Sure. But when jurors voted for acquittal, they sometimes apologized to her personally afterward. Sally was confident that whatever Tessa imagined her “loser” cases to be, they paled in comparison to this debacle.

      “This is more than a ‘loser’ case, okay? My murder victim held a press conference.”

      “This is where I remind you that we’re bureaucrats. We’re lowly cogs in a wheel on a big justice machine. You’re not the only one who decides to bring a murder case to trial.” She removed her hand from Sally’s to absentmindedly brush a crumb off the table. “That evidence must have been pretty darn compelling, for Jack to agree to go to trial without a body.”

      Sally had thought so. Now she didn’t know what to think, other than that the instincts she’d always trusted had been horribly wrong. “The evidence was good.” She reached for her glass of lemon water and finished it off. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Let’s change the subject.”

      “Okay.” Tessa set her fork down beside her plate and softened her gaze. “How are things going? How are you feeling?”

      That hadn’t been the change of subject Sally had hoped for. Tessa was the only other person in Sally’s life who knew that she’d been undergoing fertility treatments for months, trying to conceive her first child. The only other person who knew she’d been successful. “I don’t want to jinx it,” she said quietly. “So far, so good.”

      “Any nausea? Fatigue?”

      Sally shook her head, not wanting to confess that even though she was early in the pregnancy, the lack of symptoms troubled her. “Not yet, but who knows? Maybe Mr. X just has great genes.”

      Mr. X was the man of last resort, the final reproductive frontier. The anonymous sperm donor. He was the concept to which a woman turned when she wanted a family, but the men she’d met were complete duds. When a woman spent so much of her youth heartbroken over men who were more interested in the size of her trust fund than the content of her character, she reached a breaking point. For Sally, that point came last year, when she’d walked in on her fiancé, Michael, with another woman.

      She didn’t understand her luck. She was repellant to decent guys and syrup to creeps, and she’d spent more than enough time around men who’d treated her poorly. Ben, for example. She’d once allowed herself to believe she’d fallen in love with him. He’d gotten what he wanted from her, and then he’d been purposefully cruel. Broke off contact. Saw other women. Treated her as if what they’d shared had been nothing. Seeing him again reminded her of how foolish and naive she’d once been.

      Well, no more. She was done. She wanted a baby and she would have one, but she’d just eliminate the middleman, so to speak. In a way, the decision was liberating. No more heartbreaks like the one she’d experienced with Michael. No walks of shame after a one-night stand, or waiting for a phone call that would never come. No more! She’d turned thirty-five over the summer and decided it was now or never. Insurance covered most of the treatments, and she had nothing to lose except the painful fear that she’d live out the rest of her life alone.

      Sally knew nothing about her sperm donor except his education level, where he’d attended school, and that he lived in a different region of the country. She had a copy of one of his baby pictures, but he hadn’t submitted a photo of himself as an adult. Mr. X, the man who would be the father of her child because she was finished with men and had completely lost hope of ever finding one she trusted enough to make a baby the old-fashioned way, was an enigma. But thank goodness for reproductive technology.

      She bit her lip. She didn’t want to talk about Mr. X. He was the white flag she was waving at her future. Yes, she appreciated his help, but he sort of depressed her, too.

      “The doctor says it’s probably too early for symptoms, and that I should feel grateful for any day I wake up and feel like eating breakfast.” She looked at Tessa’s large gray eyes. “But you know? I worry. I do. I worry about being too happy and getting too attached. I feel like I’ve been swimming upstream. I thought I was having a baby with Michael, and look how that turned out.” The memory was still painful. “I just want something to go my way for once. Perfectly and easily my way.”

      “Oh, honey.” Tessa grasped her hand warmly again, between hers. “It will. I want this for you, too.”

      Sally squeezed her friend’s hands before gently pulling back. “Anyway, I haven’t been thinking about it much since I found out last week that I was pregnant, because I have this trial. Had this trial.” She twirled her straw around in her glass. “What am I going to do?” She brought her elbow to the table and rested her forehead on her hand. “I’m so finished. Ben is going to find something, and he’s going to ruin me with it. I just know he is.”

      Tessa arched her elegant brown eyebrows. “What makes you sure he’s out to get you? I met him, and he seems like a nice guy. Straightforward.”

      “Ben is not nice,” Sally informed her. “If his picture was in a dictionary, it would be filed under ‘nice, antonyms.’ He is the anti-nice, and now he’s my coworker. Oh, and he’s reviewing my file, and he’s going to ruin my life. Et cetera.” She paused. “He wants me to stop sneering at him. He says that I need to give him a second chance.”

      Tessa raised her eyebrows. “You held out on me! A second chance—what’s that, like a date?”

      She shifted in her seat. Suddenly, there wasn’t enough air in the room. “It’s not a date. It’s more like blackmail.”

      Tessa chuckled. “Blackmail? Yeah, right. A man who looks like Ben McNamara can blackmail me that way anytime.”

      Sally felt an odd flash at her friend’s light remark, a twitch that felt something like jealousy. She tugged at the diamond stud in her right earlobe. No, not jealousy. She’d have no reason for that. The feeling must be protectiveness. “You wouldn’t like Ben. Besides, you should watch out for him.”

      “Oh? Why’s that?”

      “He likes brunettes.” Sally refolded the cloth napkin in her lap. “He also likes redheads, and blondes, so...”

      “Okay,