Free One More Time by Deborah Cooke

shut with her fingertips, glad for once that her office wasn’t big enough to swing a cat. She could reach everything without getting out of her chair and on this day, that was an advantage.
    “I’m in Chicago.”
    Hope woke up and took a look around. Had he changed his mind? “I thought you were going to New Orleans.”
    “I have a connection here, and a bit of time.”
    Hope died, a writhing death on hot pavement with a stiletto through its heart. It was a nasty death, the kind of death nothing could ever deserve.
    Leslie didn’t say anything more, couldn’t say anything because of the lump in her throat. Matt’s voice sounded gravelly, rougher than it usually did but maybe it was the connection.
    Maybe it was the Scotch.
    Maybe it was regret.
    Maybe she’d never know for sure.
    Leslie felt again the burden of things unsaid, secrets that she’d never meant to become secrets—no, there was only one thing she’d never mentioned to Matt, one thing that had grown in silence beyond all expectation. Her tongue was swollen with it now, especially given what she had just done.
    But where do you start to talk, to really talk, when you haven’t done it for years? How do you begin to tell someone you love about the sacrifice you made to keep him around, especially when he’s going going gone? How do you admit that you haven’t told him what you were really feeling because you loved him enough to protect him from your nasty little truth?
    How do you cough up the nerve to show your vulnerabilities, especially when he’s already out the door, maybe forever?
    Leslie didn’t know.
    Finally, Matt cleared his throat. “You’re so quiet.”
    “I was always taught that if I couldn’t say anything nice, then I shouldn’t say anything at all.”
    “But you’re usually quiet.”
    Leslie kept silent, letting him work that out all by himself.
    “You don’t get it, do you?” he asked softly. He sounded so close that his voice made the hair on the back of her neck rise. She could imagine him, leaning in a telephone stall, receiver tucked under his chin, hand braced against the wall. Maybe he’d loosened his tie again. She closed her eyes, imagining that he was whispering directly into her ear.
    His next words were somewhat less than the romantic murmur that would have been ideal. “Laforini was guilty, Leslie. There was absolutely no doubt about it. I had to lose the case.”
    “Had to?” She couldn’t bite back her sarcasm completely, not this time, not this day. “I thought it was your job as defense attorney to, um, defend your client.”
    “Right. How could I have lived with myself if I had encouraged any mitigation of his sentence?” His tone hardened. “He was a mobster through and through. He’d killed lots of people himself and ordered the killing of many others—the charges were only the tip of the iceberg. The police reports were something else. Do you want someone like that on the streets? He didn’t deserve a defense, so I didn’t give him much of one.”
    A new fear seized Leslie. “But wait, if he has mob connections...”
    “Don’t worry about that.” Matt was dismissive. “He just thinks I’m incompetent. You know, I was sure he would change lawyers. I don’t think he had a lot of choices, though, or as many allies as people thought. You’re one of the few who know that it wasn’t stupidity on my part.”
    Leslie wasn’t so sure that she was glad to be in on this particular secret.
    Matt cleared his throat. “The point, Leslie, is that I couldn’t have done anything else. How could you have looked at me if I had kept the truth from getting its day in court?”
    Leslie straightened in her chair, a spark of anger lighting within her. “You aren’t suggesting that you did this for me?”
    “No, I’m saying I did it because of you.”
    “I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t you want to win the case that was your golden opportunity to have a successful career?”
    “A golden