Judgment Read online

  “I know you worry about him,” Linda said. “That’s not going to change. I get it. After all you’ve been through, my God. But you know you’ve gotta fight that. You can’t have that in your head every day.”

  “I know. You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”

  “You had something you wanted to hash out?”

  “Yeah, it’s this weird situation. On the Wheelz case, in fact. So Wheelz just added another lawyer to the defense, and it turns out to be a guy I know.”

  “Okay?” Linda blinked a few times: What’s the big deal?

  Juliana knew she was treading a difficult path here. She obviously couldn’t tell Linda the full truth, that she’d actually slept with the guy. That was the sort of thing that became hot gossip. Also, she didn’t want to tell her what had happened because it felt like just saying it aloud would make it real.

  Instead, she said, “We had a drink, last week in Chicago.”

  “At the bar conference?”

  Juliana nodded. “I don’t know if I should say something.”

  Linda shrugged. “Isn’t Harlan Madden the lead?”

  “He is. And Glenda Craft for the plaintiff.”

  “You’ve socialized with Craft and Madden both, I assume.”

  “I have.”

  Linda tipped her head to one side and peered at her strangely. “The new defense lawyer is with Batten Schechter?”

  “I assume so.”

  “A drink?” Linda said. She smiled again, cryptically. “You had a drink with him. Fine, we’ll go with that. A drink. Honey, no reason to be ashamed. You would be shocked at how many married women have affairs. Quiet little affairs on the side.” Linda had been divorced since her late thirties.

  Juliana flushed. Was she that transparent? Was there something about the way she’d talked about Matías that gave it away? “Oh, come on,” she said.

  “Marriage is dull and grinding and constraining, and you know it.”

  Well, that’s why you’re divorced, she thought. “Can be,” she said.

  “We idealize marriage, and turns out the actual thing is a crashing disappointment.”

  “Not for everybody,” Juliana protested.

  “I’ve got a friend, I’m not going to tell you her name, she’s one hundred percent faithful to her husband except when she’s out of town on work each month. You can love your husband and still have unmet needs.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Listen: since 1990, the number of women who report they’ve cheated on their husbands has gone up forty percent. Forty percent.”

  “What about the number of men who admit they’ve cheated?”

  “Stayed flat. See, women are turning to infidelity as a way to stay in their marriages! Because married life is boring and constraining.”

  “Okay,” Juliana said. This was not the conversation she wanted to have. And she certainly wasn’t going to tell Linda about Chicago. If she “confided” in Linda, it would be public in a matter of hours.

  “Your husband is like your third kid. Another child to pick up after. You’re a judge, you’re a professional woman with a big career, yet you have to get dinner on the table and do the dishes. Right?”

  “Actually, no. Duncan helps out a lot,” she said. “He cooks dinner more often than I do. I’ll just get takeout from Whole Foods or something.”

  “Okay, so you had drinks with a lawyer in your courtroom. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’ve also had drinks with the defense and the plaintiff’s side, right? Why is that an issue?”

  “The question is, Should I be recusing myself?”

  “You know the drill. It’s a two-pronged analysis. You examine your own conscience and ask yourself, Can I be objective? So, can you?”

  Juliana nodded. “For sure.” She wasn’t going to let what had happened between her and Matías factor into the court case. That night—it was over. It was one and done, as far as she was concerned. But what the hell was he doing on the defense team? Why had he lied about being in venture capital?

  “And is this a situation where your impartiality might reasonably be questioned?”

  Questioned by whom? she wondered.

  Her stomach tightened.

  She knew she wasn’t biased, but would others have reason to wonder? Only if they knew the truth. But if she didn’t say anything, who was going to know? Yet if she told anyone the truth, her life would change forever.

  “Sorry, what did you say?” She’d lost her train of thought.

  “Is there any reason to question your impartiality?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  She looked away, feeling slightly relieved.

  And then she noticed a man sitting in a plump leather club chair in a dark corner of the library.

  It was him. Matías.

  Jesus Christ.

  She was overcome by vertigo. It felt as if she were falling through space.

  The man was stalking her.

  By now Linda was taking note of the shift in her expression, probably the color she could feel spreading across her face.

  “I don’t know,” Juliana said at last.

  Matías was sitting about twenty feet away.

  Why is he here?

  “Most people would say you’re making a big deal out of nothing,” Linda said softly. She seemed to mean it as a question. She looked at Juliana hard; she seemed to know more than she was saying. “Myra Silver’s death means the federal judgeship is open; you’re aware of that, right?”

  She was barely listening. “I suppose.”

  Linda smiled. “You suppose? Word on the street is that you’re being seriously considered for the job. I suppose you’re aware of that too?”

  Juliana nodded. “You’re not the first to say so,” she admitted.

  “You want to be very careful about the decisions you make these days,” Linda said. “You know, you look at some of the recent Supreme Court appointments—I mean, these are people who always put every foot right. They made the right friends and executed every move perfectly. It’s like some giant quadrille, and it never stops.”

  “Does that sound like me?”

  “You’ve always got to play the long game. The higher you climb, the thinner the air gets, and the ledge you walk on gets narrower and narrower. So be careful.”

  7

  She walked Linda downstairs, embraced good-bye, went back upstairs.

  Had she imagined him? Had that been some kind of hallucination?

  But Matías was still sitting in the club chair in the corner. She looked around. No one was sitting nearby.

  “Your Honor,” he said quietly.

  She felt something like a kick in the stomach.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she whispered, closer to a hiss.

  “Juliana. I’m sorry about this.” He looked genuinely sad.

  “I don’t know who you are or what sort of game you think you’re playing, but I’m not going to be trapped or coerced or manipulated.”

  “Juliana, don’t try to resist. For your own sake.” He didn’t say it menacingly; there was even something like tenderness in his voice.

  “What do you think you’re going to accomplish?”

  “You’ll grant our motion for a protective order. You will say that the company has the right to protect confidential and proprietary information. That they can withhold certain chats.” He shrugged. “All quite reasonable.”

  She laughed, low and rueful. “Oh, I see. You’re trying to blackmail me, is that it?”

  He was still for a moment. When he spoke next, it was in a whisper.

  “There’s a video.”

  “I’m sorry? What did you say? A—”

  He nodded once. “Yes, Juliana. A video.
Of that night.”

  Her mouth went dry. “Bullshit. Matías, or whatever the hell your real name is.”

  He leaned to one side and pulled out a laptop from his shoulder bag. He opened it and clicked an icon. A video started playing in a large window on his screen.

  “Oh, my God,” she said.

  It took her a moment to orient herself, but then she could see her naked torso crisply, the roil of her breasts as she moved up and down, riding him. It was unmistakably her. Over her right shoulder, his face. Also clear. The video was playing on some kind of video-sharing website. Next to the window a box was checked: “Private.”

  “All I have to do is click the ‘Public’ box, and your life as you know it is over.” A member of the rambunctious fireplace party was walking by, probably on her way to the restroom. Matías closed the laptop and put it back in his shoulder bag. “You can already imagine what the tabloids will call you. The Love Judge, right? But the thing is, nobody ever needs to see this video. The choice is yours.”

  Disgusted, her lip curling, she said, “What would your late wife think about this?”

  Matías gave her a pitying look.

  She felt faint. Of course: the whole thing was a carefully scripted snare. There was no late wife. She had been painstakingly played and seduced. “That picture of your daughter you showed me,” she said. She remembered the blond, pigtailed girl, the red-and-white-striped T-shirt, the gap-toothed smile. “You don’t have a daughter, do you?”

  “I used what they gave me. I assume it was some Google Image grab.”

  What they gave me.

  “Well, good for you,” she said bitterly. “You must be so proud of the work you do.”

  “You understand what this means, yes?”

  “I’m going to rule the way I’m going to rule. However I decide.”

  “And if you rule the wrong way, I check ‘Public.’ But why would you want to do this? You’re a judge. Your rulings might be appealed, but the decision-making behind your choices? Your choices? Nobody will ever second-guess that. Nobody will ever have to know.”

  She was silent.

  “Or, Juliana? If you defy them, you get in their way—then the judgment will come. No appeals. No mercy. No justice. You’ll be ruined.”

  “You’re threatening an officer of the court.”

  “I am only telling you the truth.”

  Juliana was momentarily stymied. She couldn’t find the words. Finally she said, “What’s to stop me from picking up the phone and calling The Boston Globe?”

  “And telling them what? That your career on the bench is over? That for law firms you’ve become untouchable? And as for your personal life, your kids, your husband, your marriage—you’ll need to decide how much you value it. I’m sure the Globe would love to run a piece about the sordid fall of a Massachusetts Superior Court judge. But is that really in your interest?”

  She looked at him long and hard. Finally she said, “I don’t accept this.”

  “I advise you to see it through,” said Matías. “You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”

  “Neither do you,” she said.

  8

  The house was quiet when she arrived home, but deceptively so. She knew Jacob was upstairs in his room, headphones on, listening to music, and maybe even doing his homework. Duncan was probably in his home office working on his journal article.

  And the kitchen was still a mess.

  Juliana put on an apron and set to work carrying dishes to the sink, rinsing them, and loading the dishwasher—a mindless exercise that allowed her to think about what had happened.

  The scene at the Bostonia Club had blotted out everything else. Matías Sanchez sitting sedately, almost regally, in the leather wingback chair, reading a copy of The Economist.

  If you defy them, you get in their way—then the judgment will come. No appeals. No mercy. No justice. You’ll be ruined.

  Them.

  He had seduced her in Chicago in order to entrap her. To blackmail her. And she had willingly, and thoughtlessly, gone along with it.

  He was, had to be, working for Wheelz. To force a verdict favorable to the company. Why in the world go to such lengths for a sex-discrimination case? She didn’t get it.

  If you defy them, you get in their way—then the judgment will come. No appeals. No mercy. No justice. You’ll be ruined.

  Well, they weren’t going to get what they wanted. She scraped crusted cheese off a plate.

  Her reply—I don’t accept this—had been piddling and inadequate, but she’d been stunned into near silence. Almost paralyzed from fear.

  She didn’t know what to do. She only knew she had to do something.

  Washing the dishes she noticed that her hands were trembling. As she was rinsing, a wineglass slipped from her fingers and shattered in the sink.

  “Shit,” she said.

  “Hey, let me do that,” she heard Duncan say, entering from his study. “I’m sorry, Jake and I got into a discussion after dinner, and then I had an idea for my lecture tomorrow.”

  “That’s okay.” Washing dishes gave her an excuse not to have to look him in the face. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “No, honey,” he said, and gently nudged her aside. “I just need some wet paper towels.” She shrugged, stepped out of his way. He dipped a couple of sheets of paper towels in the running water, then used them to carefully pick up the broken pieces of glass. When he was finished, he rinsed the sink and dried his hands.

  Then he said, “Can we talk?”

  Her stomach dropped. Did he know something?

  But then she noticed he was holding something small in his right hand.

  She turned off the water, wiped her hands on her apron, and turned to look.

  “What’s that?” she said. The thing he was holding was a short cylinder with a mouthpiece on it.

  “Our son is vaping.”

  “Like, smoking?”

  “Marijuana.” Duncan looked like he was trying hard not to smile.

  For an instant, Juliana felt an enormous sense of relief. Vaping? So Duncan didn’t know about Matías and Chicago? This wasn’t about that. This was a problem she could deal with. As he closed the door to the kitchen so Jake couldn’t overhear, she took in a deep, calming breath.

  Duncan sat down at the kitchen table, and she sat down next to him.

  “Was this what you were talking to him about tonight?”

  “Yeah. He says he does it with friends, on the weekends, when they’re playing video games. He says he never gets high before school.”

  “So you . . . You know, I wish we could have talked about this all together.”

  Duncan nodded slowly. “I found the cartridge, the pen top, on the floor next to the washing machine, and I didn’t even think. I yelled for him, and we started talking. But I should have, you’re right.”

  It was an old story. Her long hours at work often meant that Duncan played a kind of first responder to the kids.

  “I don’t know what you said to him, but I really don’t want him smoking pot.”

  “I don’t think we can stop him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re not with him twenty-four seven. We have to be realistic about it. And, look, he’s self-medicating, that’s what’s really going on here. He does it to unwind, relax. He says he’s got all this anxiety about grades and getting into college and stuff, and this is how he copes. I mean, I smoke weed once in a while myself, right? I also take an SSRI. And you and I have our vodka martinis, our cosmos. I’m in no position to complain about his use of marijuana.”

  On the counter she found a three-quarters-full bottle of pinot noir and uncorked it. She poured a glass for Duncan, took a sip, and handed it to him. “Dunc, how do we know it’s even safe for him?”

  “Safe
?”

  “Given his—you know.” She didn’t even like saying it. “His health.”

  Jake had been eleven when he noticed a lump on his neck. He’d been tired a lot. Juliana at first suspected something like strep throat, only his throat didn’t hurt. The doctor ordered a biopsy. They got the news a few days later: their son had Hodgkin lymphoma, stage 3.

  The diagnosis hit them like a freight train. “Is it curable?” she asked the oncologist.

  “Highly treatable,” the oncologist replied. They never said “cured.” No such thing. Juliana remembered feeling as if she were walking through fog. Her child had cancer; it was as plain and as horrible as that. They were now in a world of blood tests and chest X-rays and bone-marrow biopsies.

  He was given three cycles of chemotherapy, a cocktail of drugs in an IV drip every two weeks that made him sick to his stomach. But it worked. He was in remission, the oncologist happily announced. “Thank God he’s cured,” Duncan said.

  “Well, he’s in remission,” the doctor replied. “We don’t say ‘cured.’”

  “Why not?” Duncan wanted to know.

  “Relapse is always possible.”

  “Jesus.”

  “But most of the time the lymphoma stays in remission.”

  Juliana, who had wept when she got the diagnosis, wept again at the good news. But life was never the same. Whenever he got a cold or a sore throat, whenever he complained about feeling tired, it was always there, like a shark’s fin in the water, the possibility of a relapse.

  * * *

  —

  Now, she said, “There’s all kinds of reasons why he shouldn’t do this.”

  “I don’t want him living like the boy in the bubble.”

  “I just want him to stay well.”

  “You think I don’t?”

  “Of course not. But it’s illegal in Mass. Adults may possess and use marijuana. And he’s not an adult.”