Sweet Justice. Cynthia Reese

warmed up in the microwave, stowed her own lunch, a PB&J, in her backpack along with a thermos of water and her work clothes and then struck out.

      The morning air was frigid but the biking warmed her up fairly quickly. Mallory wasn’t a practiced cyclist, but she’d done this before when funds were tight. She only wished that the helmet she’d scored at a yard sale wasn’t so aggressively princessy. Katelyn had laughed at it when Mallory had brought it home, saying it had so many sparkles and bling that it looked like a unicorn had sneezed on it.

      As Mallory rode into the downtown area, her spirits rose. She liked this little town with its cheerful awnings and bricked sidewalks. She could imagine kids playing in the fountain in the summer, and the whole place seemed alive and vibrant and inviting with its mom-and-pop-style businesses. It wasn’t like the dying downtown back in the city—there, for years, the center of town had slowly spiraled into pawn shops and adult-video stores, and only now were the locals finally fighting back.

      She’d spied a deserted farmer’s market pavilion as well on her way in, and that gave her hope for cheap vegetables later on. Cheap was good, as broke as they were, and Katelyn needed good food to help her regain her strength—not junky food like Andrew Monroe’s pizza, despite how tasty it had been.

      And free and impeccably timed. Don’t forget that. I should write him a thank-you note.

      It still bugged her that he’d left so abruptly. Had it been something she’d said? Something she hadn’t? He’d disappeared as suddenly earlier that same morning, nowhere to be found after she’d talked over Katelyn’s evaluation with Maegan. It had to be about the lawsuit.

      The lawsuit.

      She was still of two minds about that. When an old coworker had visited the hospital and urged her to talk to an attorney, Mallory hadn’t wanted to even think about it. Katelyn had been still fighting for her life, and something about suing anybody at that point seemed almost guaranteed to jinx her progress.

      Her coworker had insisted, even to the point of bringing an attorney that she knew to see Mallory in the hospital.

      Chad had sat down with her, put her at ease right away. “You’re not taking anything from anybody,” he’d pointed out. “They took something from you. They took Katelyn’s health away, now, didn’t they? Shouldn’t they pay the medical bills?”

      And so she’d allowed him to look into things. He’d been enthusiastic about the merits of the case—a fireman admitting that he’d left a poor helpless teenager in a burning building? Surely any jury would award them the medical expenses and give them a little money to help recompense Mallory for the days she’d had to be away from work to stay with Katelyn.

      Those medical bills... Every single day in the ICU was another ten grand, and it went on and on, setback after setback. Mallory had only been able to afford the bare-bones catastrophic insurance plan for her and Katelyn, with a deductible that was ten thousand dollars, and her coinsurance after that was 40 percent of the negotiated rates of service, until an out-of-pocket max of twenty-five thousand dollars. Already the monthly payments for that deductible and her 40 percent were eating into their tight cash flow, but what else could she do? File bankruptcy? Her parents would have never countenanced that.