After Bracken is safely on the elevator, Julia looks down at her watch and sniffs, “Damn, I thought he was asking you to marry him.”

I hand her the cash to deposit for me, realizing now that Bracken didn’t even ask for a receipt. I’ll have Julia send him one.

“He was,” I say and explain.

Julia looks respectful for the first time in a month.

“Surely he can afford a tailor.”

I let that one pass and walk back to my office to study the file. I feel uneasy, wondering what I am getting myself into. I have the same mixture of dread and awe for Bracken that is supposed to be reserved for God. Where is the dread coming from? I can’t quite pin it down, but more than likely it is that I won’t come close to measuring up to him in a direct comparison.

This is my chance to prove how good I am in the sight of the master, and I already feel my stomach begin to churn. Fear. Attorneys don’t talk about it publicly, but the anxiety is so tangible it becomes like a separate organ in the body once you enter the courtroom in a big case, especially if you aren’t as prepared as you should be. No profession except acting and politics risks greater public humiliation, a professor told my fresh man torts class. That’s why he taught, he cracked. As he pointed out, the public isn’t allowed in the operating room with a surgeon during a triple bypass. Your mistakes in public can send men and women to their deaths just as easily.

As I squint at Bracken’s terrible handwriting, I realize I am imagining myself giving the closing argument in the case and Bracken nodding with approval. How ridiculous Bracken isn’t that great. But he is. Right at the top of the heap, and there would be nothing more satisfying than to read in the pages of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette the day after Leigh Wallace’s acquittal a quote by Bracken that I was going to be better than he was. What an ego I have! The truth is, though, that I hope he is too sick to do anything but watch the entire trial.