Free Thorns of Truth by Eileen Goudge

from the sight of Marie’s spine running like a lumpy seam up the back of her cheap polyester blouse. She asked, “Would it have made a difference if I’d tried talking you out of it?” Marie had been nineteen and pregnant, but, still …
    Marie shrugged, settling back into her chair. “You’re talking ancient history. Who the hell knows? For one thing, with Nonnie breathing down my neck twenty-four hours a day, I’d probably have run off with the Son of Sam if he’d asked. The only thing I regretted at the time was leaving you alone with that old bat.”
    “I had Clare, remember?”
    At the mention of her younger sister, Marie snorted. “For whatever it was worth. Saying all those rosaries might’ve put her one step closer to heaven, but let’s face it, living with Miss Goody Two-Shoes was hell.” Roughly, she shook a teaspoon of sugar into her mug straight from the box, then sat back and lit a cigarette. She was the only person Rose allowed to smoke in her home. “Anyway, Pete was okay when he wasn’t drinking.”
    Rose idly stirred her coffee. What did you say to a woman who’d been beaten for years, until she finally got fed up enough to walk out? A woman who was hospitalized once with a ruptured kidney, and whose nose had been broken more times than a prizefighter’s? At the time, Rose had had plenty to say. But now …
    If Marie had little sympathy for others, she had none for herself. And if her tiny apartment in Port Washington, which was all she could afford on her salary as a Macy’s clerk, wasn’t exactly what she’d wanted out of life, Marie was far too proud to show it.
    “But if it was your son, Bobby or Gabe?” Rose persisted.
    Marie set her mug down with a decisive clunk. In the stark morning light, with the smoke from her cigarette drifting in lazy wreaths about her head, her eyes were a queer shade of milky blue that Rose associated with burned-out lightbulbs.
    “I’d do whatever I could to save him,” she said in a voice as hard and tight as the look on her face. “Get rid of the girl myself, if I had to.”
    Monday morning, Rose sat at the desk in her office, feeling vaguely let down. She couldn’t put her finger on what was missing … until she remembered that this month was when she and Max had planned to take that trip to Nepal they’d always talked about—he’d wanted to go hiking in the Himalayas at least once before he died, he’d told her.
    Two months after sending in the deposit, he was in a mahogany casket being lowered into the ground.
    And now his widow sat with her back to a breathtaking view of Park Avenue and Fifty-second from the twenty-fourth floor that another executive would have forfeited several years’ worth of vacations to be gazing out on.
    With a sigh, Rose leaned back in her swivel chair, staring at the accordion file in front of her, bulging with filings, briefs, affidavits, rulings—and that was only the last few months’ worth. There was a whole file drawer in the outer office dedicated to Esposito v. St. Bartholomew’s Hospital . And now, finally, it was going to trial. Max would have been pleased, she thought. Though it was technically her case—via Rachel, who was affiliated with St. Bart’s—from day one, Rose and Max had worked side by side on it, compiling and documenting. Hadn’t it initially been Max who’d argued in favor of their representing the hospital, and thus taking on what had all the markings of a lost cause? He’d pointed out that however sympathetic a jury might feel, the plaintiff—a seventy-five-year-old woman who’d suffered a stroke on the operating table while having her gallbladder removed—had been chronically ill to begin with, and that there had been no clear negligence on the part of her doctors.
    Max. God, how she wished he were here. While she tended to sift doggedly through mountains of discovery material, piecing together a case bit by bit, Max usually spied the one piece of evidence so obvious that