The Hardest Fight. Amy Vastine

was a strange statement and one Dylan wasn’t sure what to do with. “I am. Do you need a lawyer? Did you kill someone in here?” He leaned forward and took a peek inside her office for a dead body.

      Her shoulders sagged. “I need to consult with someone on a case. I can’t figure out what’s going on and I’m ready to pull my hair out.”

      She had pretty blond hair. The last thing he wanted was for her to yank it all out. Dylan’s fingers itched to run through it as they used to when she hadn’t been so opposed to his existence.

      “You can consult with me,” he offered. He quickly questioned whether that was the answer she was looking for. He could never be sure with her. “If that’s what you need.”

      Lucy stepped back and waved him into her office. Warily, he crossed the threshold. Maybe this was some sort of trick. She might be luring him in only to take him out. He pulled on the collar of his T-shirt and sat down.

      “I agreed to take this divorce case, but it’s bigger than that. My client brought me all these files and said that she’s afraid her husband set her up, possibly tricked her into committing a crime. I think he might have embezzled some money from his company and made it look like it was her doing. Do you have any idea what any of this means?”

      She turned her laptop around, revealing a spreadsheet. Dylan pulled the computer closer and began scrolling through the information. He was no accountant, but he had analyzed enough similar documents in white-collar cases to know that Lucy had every reason to be concerned.

      “It’s called smurfing. You deposit small amounts of money into several accounts. The banks would have to report a fifty-thousand-dollar deposit but not five ten-thousand-dollar deposits. He just had to make sure he did them over a long enough period of time, since he was doing it all under her name. What else do you have that connects your client to this?”

      Lucy shared the other files from the flash drive as well as hard copies of some documents, including bank statements in her client’s name. Dylan examined everything carefully and asked questions as he scanned each piece of potential evidence.

      What felt like minutes turned into hours. It was as if they were transported back in time, back to when they would work on mock cases in their criminal defense class or when they spent entire days studying for the bar exam. They had always collaborated so well, balancing out one another’s strengths and weaknesses. Dylan realized it wasn’t just working with Lucy but working on something meaningful that made him feel more alive than he had in a long time.

      “Look at this,” he said after scanning one of the PDFs with a list of financial transactions. “I think he’s taken more than what he put in the accounts in her name. This company comes up multiple times but it’s not on the list you showed me earlier.” He dug through some papers until he found the right one. “Brick Industries must be something he set up to funnel money into.”