He Chose Her, I Chose The Divorce Attorney

Margo Ferriday had taken down other people's worst days for twenty-four years. Twenty-eight inches from the machine to the chair. The seat with the light coming over the shoulder, the seat nobody wants.

At eleven-oh-seven on a Thursday morning in March, her husband called a ten-minute break in his own conference room. At eleven-oh-eight, ten feet from a door that had never latched right, he told his associate that everything got easy after the fee cleared. He also told her that his wife had gone twenty-four years without opening a single envelope from a bank.

Margo lifted her hands off the keys. Off the record is off the record, and it stayed that way, and nothing from that room ever reached a pleading.

What reached a pleading was the ledger. One spiral book, one line per job, since February of 2002. Four hundred and nine jobs for Ferriday Law. Sixty-one expedites at standard rate. Twenty-two rough drafts at no charge. Thirty-eight cancellations absorbed inside twenty-four hours. Six years of Sunday exhibit indexing at nothing an hour.

Her attorney filed on general indignities and pled no adultery, no dates, no names, no rooms. The boring road, and the only road she would take.

Her husband told a room she never read anything.

She had been reading three hundred pages a day since 1999.

A standalone revenge story in the Lies, Cheats, & Dirty Deeds series