Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954)

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Acknowledgments

The day news broke that Arlen Fieldstone had been released from prison was the day the first flutterings of Lauren’s heart began. The muscle that for all her life had pumped so courteously and discreetly within her chest suddenly clamored for attention. As she stood on the sidewalk at a busy newsstand, adding low-cal sweetener to her morning coffee and trying to ignore Arlen Fieldstone’s sad eyes on the front page of the newspaper, she felt an odd thump behind her ribs, as if a small firework had gone
pop
—just once—before it disappeared.

She paused, and after the twinge subsided, she went about the rest of her day as gently as she could, trying not to pay too much attention to her heart for fear that she would invent a problem where none existed.

At her office not far from the Albany, New York, courthouse, she waved over her assistant, Rizzi, to ask how her son was doing with his broken wrist. She ordered an extra cannoli with her lunch as she sometimes did when she was feeling indulgent, and she
adjusted her schedule to allow for an extra half hour at the gym. She reviewed the files on the potential jurors she would meet that afternoon for a case against a pharmaceutical company, and she popped a few antacids. The morning’s odd tremor of her heart was nothing more than a muscle spasm—no different than if she’d gotten a cramp in her foot.

But when she arrived at the courthouse, the courthouse where she’d worked a thousand times, and where she and the opposing counsel were now readying to interview potential jurors, the heart stutters returned.

She felt just one little spasm at first, as if her heart had been jerked on a string. And though the beat faltered, she did not. She stayed focused with a tenacity that she’d practiced for so many years she no longer thought of it as tenacity at all.

Candidate after candidate came into the room, and she proceeded with her line of questioning to determine who would be the most sympathetic to her billion-dollar client:
Do you consider yourself a religious person? Do you believe there’s a limit to the amount of money a company should be penalized for pain and suffering? Do you or does anyone in your family have a condition that requires regular medication?

Thirty minutes later, what had been a hiccup in her chest was now an earthquake. She felt as if the fat, round ball of her heart was attached to a wooden paddle and a rubber band. She hadn’t realized she’d stopped talking.

“Ms. Matthews?”

Burt Sternfeld, who usually called her
Lauren
unless they were in public, sat at her side. He swiveled his chair toward her as she put her hand on her heart; underneath the fabric of her suit jacket and the silk of her shirt, the ventricles that normally moved so fluidly were gulping and sputtering. She tried to tell him she was fine, but somehow, there weren’t any words—only her breath,
going in and out of her lungs with alarming quickness. Only her heart, sending up smoke signals that something was wrong. Darkness burned holes in her peripheral vision.

Someone asked, “Is she okay?”

And it was only when she opened her eyes again that she realized they’d been closed. She must have fallen off her chair because she was on the wood floor, her pencil skirt riding alarmingly high on her thighs. She tried to sit up, to cover up and pull herself together. Burt cautioned her to relax.

“What happened?” she asked.

“You passed out,” he said, bending over her but not touching.

“For how long?”

“Just a few seconds,” he whispered to her. “Lauren—are you pregnant?”

“What? No.”

He sat back on his knees with some awkwardness, given his bulk. Though his voice was gentle, he probably didn’t realize his mouth had pulled for the quickest flash of a second into a frown. But Lauren saw everything, every micro expression that could cross a person’s face in a moment—it was what she got paid to do. And she knew that in some subconscious place deep below his very sincere compassion, he was somewhat repulsed by her breach of decorum. Fainting during voir dire proceedings was not professional at all.

“I’m fine,” she said, propping herself up on her elbows and testing for dizziness. She pulled down her skirt a few more inches, bent her knees so she could sit up straighter, and put a hand to her forehead. Though she’d sat at the defense counsel’s desk many times, she’d never seen the underside of it before. “I’m fine.”

Burt shook his head. “I’ve already called the ambulance. They’re on the way.”

Lauren didn’t protest. She pressed her hand to her chest again. Her heart was still knocking her ribs like a fish trying to bust the
surface of an icy lake. Burt and the others were staring at her with a mix of repulsion and surprise and concern, and she could hear people ducking into the room to see her—curious as onlookers who slow to see wrecked and mangled cars. She closed her eyes.

Please,
she told her restless heart.
Please just stop.

Will Farris didn’t consider himself the most observant man in Richmond, but he knew enough to know that the sleek black sedan parked for the last three days across from his antiques shop probably didn’t belong to one of the many college students who lived in the neighborhood. And so instead of buying himself one cup of coffee at the shop in the morning, he bought two.

The kid in the black sedan jumped clear out of the driver’s seat when Will knocked on the glass.