The clerk connected Vance’s drive and opened the photographer’s gallery on the projector. Vance grabbed the wireless clicker and began rapidly moving through the thumbnails, enlarging them on the screen.
Click. A blurry image of Noah boarding. Click. A photograph of me struggling with the overhead bin. Click. The viral photo.
“See!” Vance yelled. “Look at the intimacy!”
“We just watched the video explaining that, Counselor,” the judge said dryly.
Vance clenched his teeth and moved backward through the images, searching for a better angle. He passed the viral photograph and reached the image taken immediately before the turbulence began.
The photograph appeared on the enormous screen.
Vance froze. The entire courtroom seemed to stop breathing.
It was a candid image. I was looking down at Lily, my hair falling across my face, a gentle, exhausted smile on my lips as I wiped away her tears. I wasn’t looking at Noah.
But Noah was looking at me.
The camera had captured his profile in astonishing detail. He had no idea he was being photographed. And the expression on America’s most stoic, hardened military commander was one of complete, unguarded awe.
He was looking at Lily and me as though we were the only light in an otherwise pitch-black room. It was an expression of profound longing, of immediate, inexplicable devotion. It was the look of a man who had spent his life fighting wars, only to realize he had found something worth protecting.
It proved, without question, that we had never met before. Because you only look at someone that way when they strike your soul like lightning for the very first time.
Vance dropped the clicker. It hit the floor with a loud clatter.
I turned in my chair and looked at Ryan. He was staring at the projected image of Noah’s face. In that moment, Ryan understood the truth. He hadn’t simply lost the case. He had lost me, completely and permanently, not because of an affair, but because another man had recognized my worth in a single glance—something Ryan had failed to see in four years.
Judge Harrison brought his gavel down so hard that the sound echoed through the courtroom like a gunshot.
