“I’d like it to be a clause.”

Part Eleven: The Long Boring Part

Nothing in the fourteen months that followed resembled the way these things happen in stories.

There was no dramatic trial.

There was no moment in a courtroom where Sabina Vance turned around and screamed at him from the defense table.

What there was, instead, was an enormous amount of paper, and a great many hours in conference rooms, and a slow procedural grind that Chadworth found more exhausting than any deal he had ever closed, because in a deal you are trying to get something and here he was only trying to keep something from getting worse.

The county attorney’s office charged in two directions.