Bad Blood by Linda Fairstein

hand through his hair. “He’s out of surgery.”
    I hadn’t seen much of Mike’s humor in the last six months. His fiancée had been killed in a freak skiing accident, and he had withdrawn from Mercer and me — the two friends whose personal relationships had become as close as our professional ones over the last decade.
    My passage to public service had come from an entirely different direction. I had been raised in Harrison, New York, an affluent suburb of New York City. My parents had melded their diverse backgrounds into a strong, happy marriage — she the descendant of Finnish immigrants who had settled on a dairy farm in Massachusetts at the turn of the nineteenth century, and he the child of Russian Jews who’d fled political oppression before World War II and come to this country with his older brothers, my grandmother giving birth to her first “American son” two years after their arrival.
    From my mother, Maude, I’d inherited more than her green eyes and long legs. She had gone to college for a degree in nursing, and although she had given up a career she loved to raise my brothers and me, her superb nurturing skills and great compassion for people in need had found its way into my work with victims of sexual violence, who required more than a law school education from their advocates.
    My father, Benjamin, was completing his post-medical-school internship in cardiology when one night he and three friends waited in line after a twelve-hour shift at the teaching hospital to spend the evening listening to jazz at the most famous Manhattan nightclub of its day — Montparnasse. Dozens of people were killed when a kitchen fire swept through the lower floor of the crowded restaurant, the flames fueled by the starched table linens and the gauzy costumes of the chorus girls. For the next several hours, my father and the other young docs rode the ambulances that responded to treat the scores of injured patrons, alongside the beautiful but unflinching young nursing student — who escaped from the inferno with her date to join the small band of volunteers — with whom he fell in love.
    Our middle-class, suburban lifestyle changed dramatically when I was twelve years old, the year that my father and his partner in medical practice invented and patented a half-inch piece of plastic tubing that became known as the Cooper-Hoffman valve. The miraculous little device became an essential part of cardiac bypass surgery, used in operating theaters all over the world for more than a decade, and modified to keep current with medical advances to the present day.
    This lifesaving invention had supported my education at Wellesley, a first-rate all-women’s college where I majored in English literature, followed by my studies for a Juris Doctor at the University of Virginia School of Law. The trust funds established for my siblings and me had not only allowed me the luxury of buying a home on Martha’s Vineyard, but also made it possible for me to devote a career to public service while maintaining a more privileged lifestyle than many of my colleagues.
    I had thought that my own encounter with tragedy — the death of my fiancé, Adam Nyman, in a car accident as he drove to our wedding weekend on the Vineyard — would help me relate to Mike when Val was killed. But Mike had shut down on every emotional front, and my own memories of great happiness cut short by the senseless loss of life roiled up again with fresh pain that belied the passage of so many years.
    “I’ve been meaning to find the time — the right time — to ask, you know, how you’ve been doing lately,” I said. Mike’s strong profile was outlined against the car window, backlit by the overhead lights as we sped along the drive. “You want to talk?”
    “Not now.” His eyes never left the road.
    “I worry that you’re—”
    “Worry about yourself. Worry about your case for the next few weeks. You got creatures imploding on you inside and out of