The Boy Next Door by Staci Parker Page B

towards contractual law and that was what I majored in at law school. I guess I was lured away from my morals by big money and promises of becoming a partner.
    I had dusted off those contractual law skills and found that I was finally finding my niche. Word of mouth was where I got most of my clients. I would not stoop to the level of advertising on a park bench or the side of a bus. McKenzie law was now synonymous for helping those small companies to survive in this dog eat dog world.
    I have a client that just hired me to make sure that their interests were my main concern. They told me that they thought that this big company that wanted to merge with them was trying to pull a fast one. They had given me the contract and I had gone over it with a fine tooth comb. If I wasn’t that damn good, I probably wouldn’t have found it. There was a fine print amendment that said after the first year that if the smaller company didn’t reach a certain level of productivity than the bigger company could take it over without any monetary supplement. That was in layman’s terms and it took me a long time to unravel the legal jargon that this company’s high priced lawyers had put together.
    I had a meeting with that company’s owner and I was going to unceremoniously tell him that this was never going to fly. He wasn’t going to like it, but he was going to have to live with the fact that we were going to have to come up with something that would benefit both companies and not just one.
    I looked at the photo on my desk. The smiling face in the picture had always brought a tear to my eye. She was always going to be my little girl, no matter if she was in heaven or not. Her death had hit me hard and I think I finally realized that God does work in mysterious ways. Her loss afforded me the opportunity to look at myself more closely. At the time I had been working my nails to the bone just to continue the party line making the rich richer and the poor poorer. I wanted to be better than that and make Angela, my little girl, proud of me as she sat looking down from her cloud above.
    She would have been ten years old today and I have this tradition of one small cupcake with boiled icing on top. It was my little girl’s favorite and here it was sitting on my desk, as a treat after a meal that was fit for a queen. I had to give myself credit for holding back for as long as I did. It was ten minutes to noon, when I finally couldn’t take it anymore. By the time Brad came in just a few minutes later, I was already polishing off the last noodle.
    “I knew it! I should’ve gone with my instinct and came in here earlier. At least you saved the best part for last.”
    Brad and I were able to work together and even flirt a little. He wasn’t even gay. He wasn’t my type, and he was already married anyway. I’d met his lovely bride and we had gotten along famously. He was completely void of hair and I’d heard him talk often about swimming professionally. The stubble on his cheeks was cute. If he hadn’t been married, maybe I would have tried something. Eaten him up like I was going to eat that cupcake.
    “I think that we should share that in the memory of your daughter,” he suggested.
    I cut it straight down the middle with a very sharp metal letter opener. I passed him his piece and we raised our halves in salute to her memory. We savored that small morsel and then we sat in silence for the next five minutes in silent prayer. I was holding onto my cross and I was reliving those memories that made it easier for me to get up in the morning.
    “I know that I’m early, but this is the only time that I have.” I raised my head and came face to face with this giant of a man. He was wearing this charcoal suit with a red power tie that was meant to intimidate. His dark hair was cut short and he looked every bit the professional that I was. “If you can’t do it now, then I can’t do it at all.”
    He was obviously trying to usurp my