Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

Please feel free to contact me if I can be of any additional assistance.

Sincerely, Maisie Donovan

I realized that the point of the nonidentifying letter was to give information that wasn’t specific-but there were so many other things I wanted to know instead. Had my father and mother broken up during the pregnancy? Had my mother been scared, in that hospital by herself? Had she held me even once, or just let the nurse take me away?

I wondered if my adoptive parents, who had raised me decidedly Protestant, had known I was born Catholic.

I wondered if Piper Reece had figured that, if Charlotte O’Keefe didn’t want to raise a child like Willow, someone else might be more than happy to have the chance.

Clearing my head, I picked up the interrogatory she’d filled out and flipped through the pages to read her side of the story. My questions had begun generically and then gotten more medically specific at the end of the document. The first one, in fact, had been a complete softball: When did you first meet Charlotte O’Keefe?

I scanned the answer and blinked, certain I’d read that wrong.

Picking up the phone, I called Charlotte. “Hello?” she said, breathless.

“It’s Marin Gates,” I said. “We need to talk about the interrogatories.”

“Oh! I’m so glad you called. There must be a mistake, because we got one with Amelia’s name on it.”

“That’s not a mistake,” I explained. “She’s listed as one of our witnesses.”

“Amelia? No, that’s impossible. There is no way she’s testifying in court,” Charlotte said.

“She can describe the quality of life in your family, and how OI has affected her. She can talk about the trip to Disney World, and how traumatic it was to be taken out of your custody and put in a foster home-”

“I don’t want her having to relive that-”

“She’ll be a year older by the time the trial starts,” I said. “And she may not need to be called as a witness. She’s listed just in case, as protocol.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t even tell her, then,” Charlotte murmured, which reminded me why I had called in the first place.

“I need to talk to you about Piper Reece’s interrogatory,” I said. “On it, I asked her when she first met you, and she said that you had been best friends for eight years.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line.

“Best friends?”

“Well,” Charlotte said. “Yes.”

“I’ve been your lawyer for eight months,” I said. “We’ve met half a dozen times in person and talked three times that much on the phone. And you never thought it might be the tiniest bit important to give me that little detail?”

“It has nothing to do with the case, does it?”

“You lied to me, Charlotte!” I said. “That has a hell of a lot to do with the case!”

“You didn’t ask me if I was friends with Piper,” Charlotte argued. “I didn’t lie.”

“It’s a lie of omission.”

I picked up Piper’s interrogatory and read out loud. “‘In all of the years we’ve been friends, I never had any indication that Charlotte felt this way about her prenatal care. In fact, we had been shopping together with our daughters a week before I got served with what I feel is a baseless lawsuit. You can imagine how shocked I was.’ You went shopping with this woman the week before you sued her? Do you have any idea how cold-blooded that’s going to look to a jury?”

“What else did she say? Is she doing all right?”

“She’s not working. She hasn’t worked for two months,” I said.

“Oh,” Charlotte said, her voice small.

“Look, I’m a lawyer. I’m well aware that my job requires destroying the lives of people. But you apparently have a personal connection to this woman, in addition to a professional one. It’s not going to make you sympathetic.”

“Neither is telling a court that I didn’t want Willow,” Charlotte said.

Well, I couldn’t argue with that.

“You may get what you want out of this lawsuit, but it’s going to come at a great cost.”

“You mean everyone’s going to think I’m a bitch,” Charlotte said. “For screwing my best friend. And for using my child’s illness to get money. I’m not stupid, Marin. I know what they’re going to say.”

“Is that going to be a problem?”

Charlotte hesitated. “No,” she said firmly. “No, it’s not.”

She’d already confessed to having problems getting her husband on board with this lawsuit. Now I’d found out that she had a hidden history with the defendant. What you didn’t tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did; I only had to look as far as my stupid nonidentifying letter to feel it firsthand.

“Charlotte,” I said, “no more secrets.”

The purpose of a deposition is to find out what happens to a person when he or she is thrown into the trenches of a courtroom. Conducted by the opposing party’s lawyer, it involves trying to impeach a potential witness’s credibility based on statements in the interrogatories. The more honest-and unflappable-a person is, the better your case begins to look.

Today, Sean O’Keefe was being deposed, and it scared me to death.

He was tall, strong, handsome-and a wild card. Of all the face-to-face meetings I’d had with Charlotte to prepare, he’d come to only one. “Lieutenant O’Keefe,” I had asked, “are you committed to this lawsuit?”

He had glanced at Charlotte, and an entire conversation had unraveled between them in utter silence. “I’m here, aren’t I?” he had said.

It was my belief that Sean O’Keefe would rather be drawn and quartered than led to a witness stand for this trial, which should not really have been my problem-except it was. Because he was Willow’s father, and if he screwed up on the stand, my case would be ruined. For this suit to succeed, the malpractice lawyers needed to believe that, when it came to wrongful birth, the O’Keefes presented a united front.

Charlotte, Sean, and I rode up in the elevator together. I had specifically scheduled the deposition during the hours you were in school, so child care wasn’t an issue. “Whatever you do,” I said, last-minute quarterbacking, “don’t relax. They’re going to lead you down the path to hell. They’ll twist your words.”

He grinned. “Go ahead, make my day.”

“You can’t play Dirty Harry with these guys,” I said, panicking. “They’ve seen it before, and they’ll trap you with your own bravado. Just remember to keep calm, and to count to ten before you answer anything. And-”

The elevator doors opened before I could finish my sentence. We stepped into the luxurious offices, where a paralegal in a fitted blue suit was already waiting. “Marin Gates?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Mr. Booker’s expecting you.” She led us down the hall to the conference room, a panorama of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out toward the golden dome of the Statehouse. Tucked into one corner was the stenographer. Guy Booker was deep in conversation, his silver head bent. He stood up as we approached, revealing his client.

Piper Reece was prettier than I expected. She was blond, lanky, with dark circles underneath her eyes. She wasn’t smiling; she stared at Charlotte as if she’d just been run through with a sword.

Charlotte, on the other hand, was doing everything possible not to look at her.

“How could you?” Piper accused. “How could you do this?”

Sean narrowed his eyes. “You’d better stop right there, Piper-”

I stepped between them. “Let’s just get this over with, all right?”

“You have nothing to say?” Piper continued, as Charlotte settled herself at the table. “You don’t even have the decency to look me in the eye and tell me off to my face?”