Chapter 31: April & November 2015

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April 25 2015

It's a balmy Saturday afternoon and twenty-five-year-old Lisa has been up since the day broke dissecting case files. Lately, weekends have become an extension of the work week for Lisa. In January she was hired as one of the new Assistant Prosecuting Attorneys at the White Collar division of the Manhattan District Attorney's office. Being an Assistant Prosecuting Attorney put Lisa at the very bottom of the DA's office hierarchy totem pole and, as it tends to happen with fresh blood, the people around her never failed to repeatedly remind her. It's one of the reasons why Lisa was working as hard as she was. She wanted to earn their respect and make them understand that she deserved to be there just as much, if not more, than any of the political hires. Lisa needed her co-workers to understand that just because she was a woman, and a queer woman at that, didn't mean she couldn't deliver results in the courtroom. Furthermore, this was the first case that she wasn't dropped into halfway through. She got to be a part of this one from the very beginning and she's set on dazzling everyone involved. Her boss, taking advantage of her evident overachieving tendencies, was making certain that he got every ounce of labor out of her that he could which is why Lisa could never seem to avoid taking work home.

Lisa sits on the floor with overflowing open folders spread in every direction around her. Once Roseanne started working as Dante's assistant at the gallery and Lisa got her job at the DA's office, they upgraded from the shitty one-bedroom apartment they shared when they got engaged to an equally shitty two-bedroom apartment because at least a second bedroom meant that Roseanne could use the extra space as her studio. Their new rental was not a complete dump, but it was far from extravagant. Roseanne and Lisa would very much rather put their money into Roseanne's IVF treatments as well as securing their future with savings and small time investments than paying for a bigger, nicer place to live. Cutting corners on rent and settling for smaller living arrangements meant that at the moment Lisa's "home office" was nothing more than a desk in the already cramped living room. Lisa is truthfully not bothered by it because she hardly ever uses it anyway. Lisa has discovered that the most effective way to get to the core of cases is by laying out all of the evidence on the floor and absorbing it all piece by piece. Every time Roseanne chastises her for the mess - and she always does, religiously - Lisa retorts with "The floor is much more spacious than a desk Roseanne". The seriousness in Lisa's voice never fails to make Roseanne laugh.

Roseanne pretends to hate when Lisa sits unmoved on the floor for hours, but she doesn't. Not even remotely. Those afternoons or nights always offer Roseanne the opportunity to sit on the couch and sketch her fiancée. Roseanne gets to take every inch of Lisa's face in and capture her delicate features on paper. Roseanne studies the ways Lisa's temple knots when she's focusing incredibly hard, the way her jaw locks when she's frustrated, or how she plays with her hair when she's simply reading over documents. Roseanne analyzes Lisa's every mannerism and each time she comes away with something new to love dearly. As much as she tends to detest how consumed Lisa gets in her work, Roseanne tries to find the silver lining and appreciates the good things it offers her.

Lisa moves some files from one pile to another as she reorganizes the evidence across from her in a more effective way. She's so engrossed in trying to come up with a better system that she completely misses the sound of the front door opening and closing.

Roseanne sets down a few gallons of paint by one of the living room walls and moves further into the apartment while still carrying a five-by-seven cardboard envelope and her phone. The twenty-two-year-old had left the house early that morning with the excuse of needing to buy more paint and art supplies. Lisa had not questioned it. Technically, Roseanne had done just that, but that wasn't the only reason she left the house.

Lisa is so enveloped in her reading that, while on some level she acknowledges that someone else is in the house and that the only person that it could be is Roseanne, the presence of another human doesn't properly register with her. Roseanne is used to this by now. It's how Lisa gets when she's diving into a case. Roseanne walks over to Lisa and hovers over her fiancée.

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