When You Least Expect It (Chaelisa)

2

As with all of her cases, they hit the ground running. By Martin Luther King Jr. Day, she meets up with Roseanne, prepared to get a full background.

The Christmas decorations in the café are taken down, leaving a much more casual atmosphere, which Lisa is more than grateful for.

"Thank you, for agreeing to have meetings here." Roseanne swipes her forearm over her forehead and knocks the visor askew, as she places a cup – caramel macchiato, she notices – in front of Lisa before she slides in across from her.

"I pick up doubles as much as I can while Abbie's in school, which gives me an hour break in between. And Jo, my boss, she's really great about me needing some time." Lisa reaches across the table and places her hand on Roseanne's, feeling the warm, soft skin flex under her palm.

"Hey, you don't have to thank me." She hopes the reassurance she very much wants to convey is on her face. She's good at this – calming people during what is usually one of the worst experiences of their life – and it's what's helped her get a leg up at work in the last decade.

Roseanne keeps up with giving her free coffee every time she comes, refusing to accept money because, "Lisa. You're doing so much for me. The least I can do is buy your drinks." As their meetings pick up, she finds that she enjoys The Bean Dream – her order is perfect every single time, and so are the sweets.

Roseanne is good at the job, she observes in the moments of down time. Work meetings are, after all, the one time she is ever running early. Roseanne's polite to customers, with a perfectly polished smile on her face that Lisa is used to seeing her give to lawyers at company parties, but it's charming regardless of the setting.

And, she notes with some small amusement, she knows people are coming here for more than just their coffee, given the second looks Roseanne often gets from most men and some women after she helps them. Roseanne regards her with an interesting combination of caution and friendliness, always sliding across from her or next to her, depending on the table she chooses.

Sometimes, the two times Lisa arrives a few minutes late, she sees Roseanne already seated, two drinks in front of her, drawing in a sketchbook. It was the same one she'd had with her at their lunch, but she'd first mistaken it for a plain notebook.

Because they have to meet in such short periods of time, she is there fairly often – a couple of times a week – but she gets all of the information she needs from Roseanne, peeling back the layers of her marriage one by one.

"We met in college. He was in law school while I was in undergrad, studying architecture. And he was charming. He pulled out all of the stops; he flew us to Paris on our three-month anniversary, and I... I'd never done anything like that before. I hadn't even ever left the country before. I didn't grow up with all of that money. Then, right before my senior year, I was pregnant. And when he proposed and asked what I thought about being a stay-at-home mom, I thought it sounded like the lives of people I envied so much."

And – "I knew he was cheating; I'm not oblivious. He's, if I had to guess, had affairs for at least six years. We were married for almost ten, and I... I'd be willing to bet in retrospect that he wasn't faithful in the beginning, either. But I've never had it thrown in my face like I did with Mindy."

And – "Michael – it's not easy to leave him. I'd thought about it so many times. I came up with all of these plans, but he has a temper. And there aren't a lot of things that scare me that aren't directly related to my daughter, but Michael at his worst... was terrifying."

And – "I want Abbie to have everything. Every opportunity I could never have. Including having two parents being there for her. But I just couldn't stay for that, anymore. Not that he ever wanted to spend time with her, anyway."