Tag: interlude

Melissa

I wake up early. I didn’t especially mean to, just woke up an hour before my alarm. I hate it when that happens. I have a hard time getting to sleep, so trying to get any more sleep will take long enough that I might as well just get up now. So I do, stretching. Shoulder feels stiff. That’s annoying. It’s been three days since I helped Shawn carry furniture around. I don’t like that my arm is still complaining about it.

I dress myself with barely-conscious movements. It’s a familiar routine, and I wake up sluggish, so it runs on autopilot. It’s just a t-shirt and jeans anyway. Hoodie today, because it’s cold out. Normal.

Check my bag, it’s fine. I don’t really have much else to do before school. I sit and try to play video games to distract myself, but I’m already too distracted for it to help. Can’t focus through the intrusive thoughts. I don’t know what it’s about, not really. I don’t know why I’m having intrusive thoughts about poison, about fire. It’s not something I remember thinking much about until recently.

There are a lot of things I don’t remember happening until recently.…

Caleb Moorhead

People lie to me a lot.

It’s inherent in my line of work. It’s inevitable. Attorneys hear a lot of lies. Cops lie about their intentions, about their evidence, about all kinds of things, really. Witnesses lie about what they’ve seen. Sometimes my clients lie to me as well, which is always frustrating. It’s very hard to defend someone when you’re working with inaccurate information.

I would much rather work with someone who was open with me about being guilty than try to represent a client who pretended to be innocent when they were very clearly not. It isn’t as though I would rat them out if they told me; it would be wildly against my personal and professional ethical codes to do so. At most, I might decline or drop their case, and even then I wouldn’t tell the police or prosecutors a word about what they’d said, because that confidentiality is a cornerstone of the legal system, and I feel strongly about maintaining it as an absolute. A client has to be able to trust that what they tell their attorney will be kept strictly, entirely confidential.…