Heartbreaker By Profession

Chapter One

On days that were slow-paced like this one, Kimberly liked to take her work back home with her and sit out on the balcony that overlooked the grassy backyard of her apartment complex and the sandy beach.

She was well aware that taking files from the Santa Clara County department of justice was against the rules – and more importantly, illegal – but on crisp, windy days like this she just could not bring herself to care. She was still trying to come to terms with what had happened at work today, and couldn't think of a better place to do it than out here in the cool breeze, listening to the ocean waves scatter across the shore.

Kimberly was lucky to live down on the second floor of her building – the perfect height from which the lush carpet of grass out back was still close enough to feel like it was hers, while in the same breath also being high enough for her to take in the view of vast ocean. The ocean that she all of a sudden wished she could just sail into and never return. She didn't know how she was going to wake up tomorrow and keep going as though everything was okay when in actuality, everything was the furthest from okay it had been in a while.

She wanted to slap herself for not leaving the office sooner.

As the clock had neared 1PM, Kimberly had noticed that not much was happening that day. The thought that maybe it was time to head out had crossed her mind, but for some reason that she could for the life of her seem to remember, she had stayed. She had sat at her desk for a few more minutes and that was when Lynn, her supervisor, approached.

Lynn informed Kimberly that she was to follow her to the conference room and sit in on the meeting they were having.

Originally, Kimberly was thrilled. I mean, what intern in their right mind wouldn't want to be called to sit in on an official meeting? And in the one-and-a-half years Kimberly had been interning at the DoJ she hadn't been called into a conference room meeting once. So she followed Lynn, silent and slightly confused, but eager nonetheless. It wasn't until she passed by the other interns (most of whom were from the same doctorate program as her) that she realized she was the only one who'd been invited along. And while she knew she was good at what she did, everything was all beginning to feel a little too coincidental for her.

Kimberly could feel the eyes of the other interns on her, following her movements all the way to the conference room. She tugged down on her skirt out of habit. Despite having worked at the DoJ for a year-and-a-half, Kimberly hadn't become friends with a single person she worked with. Not one.

In fact, it had been almost four years in California, and she hadn't made friends with a single person in the state! And so despite living in such a big , her world felt suffocatingly small.

Kimberly chalked her lack of friends up to the fact that she supposedly just didn't like Californians – at least not the ones her age. Because she loved Stanford and she loved her professors, but for some reason she couldn't make it work with the other interns or students in her program. Maybe they really were all just pretentious like she loved to claim, or maybe she was the pretentious one; she really didn't care. All she knew was that something was deeply wrong, and since she couldn't pinpoint what exactly it was, she figured it must have been the people she was surrounded by.

But California wasn't all bad for Kimberly though, after all it was a beautiful state – her campus alone was a testament to that. And that coupled with the hot weather meant that Kimberly could spend a lot of time outside, appreciating the warmth of an environment she'd grown to love. And even though she didn't particularly like the people, she could at least attest to she tolerability of one Californian in particular; her boyfriend, Chase.

She and Chase had met during the last month of their master's program at Stanford. They were both doing their practicums in Los Angeles' local government office, and finally, at the end of the year, realized they were both Stanford students and both studying for masters in the Science of Law. They bonded over that fact for the last month in LA and began to date the following fall when they realized they were both continuing on for their PhD's at Stanford as well. It all seemed too coincidental not to be a sign. And two years later, they now lived together in a rented apartment ten minutes away from campus.