Chapter 185: For N.H.
The first time Sabrina Cross and June were in the same room, I expected weather.
They were my two most unlikely inheritances.
The woman who nearly helped wreck my marriage. The girl who raised her hand at a foundation speech and asked how you start over.
Instead they found each other the way readers do, over a footnote.
June told me about it later, delighted.
Sabrina had come to legal aid day, a first-year law student now, hair shorter, voice lower, carrying a casebook like a shield.
June was staffing the sign-in table.
You are the one she quotes, Sabrina said, after reading June's badge and doing the math.
And you are the one she refused to hire, June answered, and Sabrina laughed so hard she dropped her pen.
By day's end they had traded numbers, study tricks, and an argument about whether anger is a highlighter or a strategy.
It is a highlighter, June reported. She says she learned it secondhand, through me.
Law school agreed with Sabrina the way fire agrees with a forge.
June gave me the bulletins, because Sabrina never did.
Top of her section. A professor quoting her memo in class. A seat on law review.
She does not want you to think she is performing for you, June explained. She is done auditioning. She wants the record to speak for itself.
That, I said, is the most grown-up thing I have ever heard about her.
Then came the essay.
Every first-year wrote for the school's ethics prize. Sabrina won it.
June brought me the printed copy from the award breakfast and put it on my desk like evidence.
The title was, The Ethics of Second Chances.
I read it standing up. It was good. Better than good. Honest in the way that costs something, about complicity, about doing a wrong thing because the room pays well.
She never named anyone. She did not have to.
A second chance, she argued, is not a gift the harmed party owes. It is a debt the changed person takes on, and repays in behavior, in installments, forever.
I set it down carefully.
She wrote the whole book, I said, and footnoted it as law review.
June was watching my face the way she watches depositions.
Turn to the front, she said.
The dedication page.
One line, centered, in plain type.
For N.H.
No name. No explanation. Two initials and a period, sitting on the page like a held breath.
She does not know I am showing you this, June said quickly. She did not tell anyone who it was for.
Her professors asked. She said, someone who read my pages before I did.
I sat down. My legs had decided the matter without me.
It would have been easy to call her. To say, I saw it, and watch her shine.
I did not call.
She had given it as my father used to give things. In writing, with no demand that it be found.
The right answer was to let it be found, and answer it the same way someday, when the right page came along.
I put the journal in the drawer with the comment card and the photograph and the smaller proofs of my life.
June hovered, worried she had overstepped.
You did right, I told her.
June collects lessons the way other people collect souvenirs, so I gave her one.
People think second chances are given, I said. They are not. They are built, out of installments, by the person who failed first.
Sabrina figured that out before I did.
She wrote it down in the steno pad and underlined it twice.
Neither of us said the other thing the dedication meant.
N.H. Not Wexler. Not Blackwood. Hale.
Somewhere along the way, without ceremony, without telling me, Sabrina Cross had started calling me by my father's name.
And I found, standing at my desk with a law review in my hand, that I had already started to answer to it.