I wake at five-thirty. I make coffee — the same Ethiopian blend I have been buying from the same shop on Meredith Street for eleven years, ground the night before, measured precisely, because the precision is part of the ritual. I sit for twenty minutes with the coffee and the case files, not reading them again — I have already read them, have read everything multiple times — but sitting with them, letting the day’s arguments settle into their right weight before I take them into the courtroom.
I am not a person who flutters.
I have been told this, over the years, in ways that were meant as compliments and ways that were not. A former colleague once described me as the most unflutterable person he had ever encountered in thirty years of law. He meant it admiringly. My ex-husband used the same word, in a different tone, which was part of why he eventually became my ex-husband.
