Utterly Charming by Kristine Grayson

clear-eyed perspective does.
    She believed in talent, hard work, and a clear-eyed perspective. She really did. But ever since that strange day ten years ago, she also believed in magic. The storybook kind.
    The head of legal for the shoe company would reschedule. After all, it was her expertise he was coming to see her for; she had developed several specialties, and one of them was suddenly of use to the company. If they needed her badly, they could wait. She certainly didn’t need them, not even with the divorce.
    As the Banfield left the river, she took the first exit in the Hollywood District. She had had to find a new garage; the old one had burned years ago, all but her rental, which was left standing in the middle of completely flattened devastation. The police—who were investigating the fire as an arson tied to insurance fraud—said they had never seen anything like it. It was as if, they said, that particular garage was shielded from the flames. There wasn’t even a charred stretch of paint.
    She had moved the microbus to a new garage owned by a reputable national company and had left it there for the past three years. In the past ten, she hadn’t seen or heard from Sancho or Blackstone. Max came home pale and shaken one afternoon about five years ago and said he had seen the not-dead woman in his courtroom, but when Nora asked him about that later, he denied it. He said he had only thought someone looked like the not-dead woman. Nora wasn’t so sure.
    Nora monitored her rear and side mirrors carefully as she went to the garage. She wasn’t being followed—at least, she wasn’t being followed by someone obvious. She drove into the garage and storage unit place, parked in front of her rental, and took a deep breath.
    Did she really believe dates and times she saw in dreams? Did she think that something was going to happen on this day at this time or was she here to destroy the last bit of belief she had? Max had done a good number on her. He was, in some ways, helping her reenact her parents’ relationship: she was the believer in magic, and Max was the one who wanted to destroy that. At the very last party they’d attended, before the very last screaming fight they’d ever had, he had told a colleague that in his first years of practice, the largest payoff he’d ever had was for getting a mobster out of jail before the man had ever been charged.
    The colleague had frowned as if he had known Max was lying and said, “A mobster? In Portland?” and then walked to the other side of the room. Nora had seen that as a small victory. But she still couldn’t believe that Max had bothered to tell the story, even though he had once warned her that was how he chose to remember things.
    Nora hadn’t confronted Max in person, but she had on the way home. She had asked him about the magic, about the fires, about the ruined neighborhood, about the not-dead woman, for heaven’s sake, and he had an explanation for all of them. There is no such thing as magic, he had said. There were no fires. I never saw the neighborhood you talk about, and the woman was merely riding in the ambulance.
    Nora found she couldn’t argue with such intense denial, and she finally admitted what she had been denying herself: the marriage didn’t work. It hadn’t really worked from the beginning. They had been too shy with each other. He had been too ambitious, for himself and for her. She didn’t live up to his idea of what a good defense lawyer’s wife should be. And so on and so on. She had suggested irreconcilable differences and thought the divorce would be easy.
    Of course she was wrong. Two attorneys couldn’t order a pizza without filing several briefs; they certainly couldn’t let something like a divorce occur without some sort of legal warfare.
    She glanced at her watch. It was 8:50 a.m. She had used the Internet that morning, checked Greenwich Mean Time, and done the math so that her watch was on Pacific Daylight Time to