The Real Liddy James by Anne-Marie Casey

city, leaving Liddy to cook a bleary breakfast for his parents.
    Peter’s outburst left Liddy hurt and confused. She had assumed that they had boarded the train of life together, that it was chugging along in an orderly and predictable fashion, and would eventually stop at the station of family. But she suddenly realized that while she sat enjoying the ride in peace and safety, Peter might be about to pull the emergency brake. Now that she thought about it, he positively recoiled at the idea of procreation, and while getting pregnant had never been anywhere near the top of Liddy’s to-do list, the more something might elude her, the more she wanted it; what had been true of a pet when she was ten years old was true of a baby now that she was thirty.
    The uncomfortable jolt had shown her she was ready for the next stage; clearly Peter was not. When he refused to apologize, or even discuss it, she spent a miserable forty-eight hours in a fog of distress. She recognized that a life lived by force of will candestroy as much as it can conquer. Clearly she had been an idiot to interfere with meaningful providence, or destiny, or whatever you wanted to call it.
    She packed her bags. She moved back to Murray Hill. She took photographs again. She reconnected with her few friends (she went to Intense Rafe’s exhibition of sound sculptures in Chelsea), and she refused to pick up the telephone for Peter, even when he sang embarrassingly plaintive songs into her answering machine. She had endured adversity but not tragedy, and so her personality was still bright, if brittle.
    She decided to let her true fate reveal itself.
    Liddy had heard rumors about the new and apparently quite devilishly handsome senior associate at Gillespie and Ross but had not come across him until one morning, three weeks later, in a side courtroom in 60 Centre Street. It was Marisa Seldon’s case, but Marisa had called her at 7:30 a.m. to say that both the twins and the nanny had come down with chickenpox, and that Liddy would have to handle the court appearance until she got there. It was a formality, Marisa assured her, and as she hastily read the brief in the cab, Liddy agreed.
    Marisa’s client, Natalia P., was a former aerobics instructor of mysterious origin and indeterminate age, who had taken a job as personal trainer to sixty-five-year-old multimillionaire Dwight P. and married him swiftly afterward. There were no marital assets and no kids, but the case had gone on for two acrimonious years because of yoga. Natalia P. had crushed two vertebrae in her neck after a supported headstand went wrong; her ongoingsymptoms included sensitivity to loud noises, numbness in her little toes, and occasional loss of bladder control, which made her unfit for work indefinitely, according to the statements made by three doctors, including an expert on Qigong medicine. Natalia P. looked certain to get a one-off settlement payment, enormous by anyone’s standards.
    Liddy hurried along the tiled corridor in her signature work uniform, navy pantsuit, white shirt, and ballet pumps (on days she was feeling fashion forward she wore a black metallic shirt and pinned a Sarah Jessica Parker–inspired flower corsage onto her jacket), her schoolbag briefcase slung across her chest. Natalia P. was sitting on a wooden bench, waiting. Conspicuously pale, she made an agonizingly slow trip to the bathroom just as Judge Carson arrived.
    Liddy was conscious that the opposing counsel, Sebastian Stackallan, was dark-haired and extremely tall, but she kept her eyes on her notes and the judge, and so the first thing she really noticed about him was his voice. It was a deep, melodious Irish lilt that caused Natalia P. to look over and appear to swoon visibly. It had no effect on Liddy whatsoever. She had spent too many summers in her youth trapped on the rear seats of small cars in Ireland, listening to the similarly deep and melodious voices of local radio hosts and