Escape: A Stepbrother Romance by Jessica Ashe

wasting her life and asked why she couldn’t be more like Gemma. I stormed off, but not before I saw the tears in my mother’s eyes that still pained me even today. If Gemma hadn’t talked to me the next day I might have still hated my mother when she had the accident.
    Gemma had waited until my mum left the house to go shopping and showed up with a box of files. She sat me down and made me swear that I would not tell anyone else what she was about to tell me. It was confidential and she could lose her job and her law license if anyone found out. I quickly promised, as any eleven-year-old would when asked to keep a secret that sounded exciting, and Gemma started taking files out of the box.
    One by one, she went through the files. They were legal documents about people facing trial or those who had already been found guilty but were appealing the decision. Gemma opened the first file and explained that the man in the file had been convicted of killing his wife, but there had been no evidence linking him to the crime other than an unreliable eyewitness.
    “How did he get convicted?” I asked. Even at the age of eleven I had heard of the phrase “beyond a reasonable doubt” and knew it was supposed to protect people from bad convictions.
    “He was subject to what could politely be called ‘advanced interrogation techniques,’ ” Gemma explained, “but what I would call torture. He eventually confessed, but the confession should not have been read to the jury.”
    Each file contained a similarly horrifying story where someone had been convicted in cases where procedures had not been followed and, in some cases, the police acted dishonestly with evidence.
    “Why are you showing me these?” I asked at last. While my eleven-year-old self had found it disturbing, this hadn’t quite been the cool secret I was expecting.
    “These are all cases my office agreed to look at on a pro bono basis because these people cannot afford legal representation. ‘ Pro bono ’ means without charging anyone.”
    I was even more impressed by Gemma than I had been before. Now I knew that not only did she make a tonne of money, she also did work in her spare time to help those who couldn’t afford it. It was just a reminder of what my mum could have been.
    “These must keep you busy,” I said.
    Gemma shook her head. “I don’t work on these cases. No one in my office has any time and, frankly, we’re all too obsessed with chasing more money to do this work. But I do know a qualified barrister who is happy to work for free without getting any credit for it.”
    “Who’s that?” I asked. I guess I’d been dumb as a kid.
    “Your mother, Victoria,” Gemma replied. “She told me about the argument you had with her yesterday. She’d kill me if she knew I was here and I could get in a lot of trouble for showing you these files, but you need to know that your mother is not ‘just a housewife’ as you put it. For one thing, when you’re older you will realize that looking after a child is a hell of a lot of work, but you probably won’t appreciate that until you have one of your own. However, even on top of all that, she is responsible for freeing at least seventeen people from unfair convictions and she is working on many more.”
    “Shit,” I exclaimed. I’d just learned a new swear word at school, but forgot I shouldn’t be saying it in front of adults.
    I expected Gemma to yell at me for my choice of words, but she burst out laughing. “Don’t let your father hear you speak like that,” she said. “God, you sounded just like your mother than.”
    “My mother swears?”
    “Like you wouldn’t believe,” Gemma said. “Listen, you can’t tell your mother I showed you these, but will you promise me to show her more respect?”
    I nodded. “Maybe I can help her with these one day?”
    “Sure, maybe. But I don’t think your mother wants you to become a barrister. Why don’t you spend time together some other way.