The Delacroix trial began on a Monday and, by Wednesday, had swallowed every waking hour Vivienne had.
It wasn’t the Whitmore case’s complexity that made it brutal — it was the volume.
Three depositions a day.
A discovery request the size of a phone book, due for review before Friday’s hearing.
Opposing counsel filing motions seemingly for sport, each one requiring a same-day response that fell, more often than not, directly onto Vivienne’s desk.
She stopped counting the hours by Thursday.
She simply worked until the work was done, slept in whatever gap remained, and started again.
The rest of the litigation team rotated through exhaustion in shifts, trading off late nights and early mornings, propping each other up with vending-machine coffee and gallows humor.
Vivienne noticed, distantly, that she’d stopped doing either.
She simply worked, alone, past the point where anyone else on the team would have called it quits for the night, because stopping meant sitting still long enough for something else entirely to catch up with her.
“You look like hell,” Priya said, dropping a coffee on Vivienne’s desk without being asked, the closest thing to sympathy the office generally allowed itself during trial weeks.
“Has Knight fed you at all this week, or is he just running you on caffeine and spite?”
“I’ve eaten.
Twice, I think.”
“That’s not a good sign.”
“It’s trial week.
Nobody sleeps during trial week.”
“Sure.
But most people don’t look like they’re actively vibrating out of their own skin either.” Priya studied her with real concern beneath the joking tone.
“Seriously, Vivienne.
Take five minutes.
Eat something that isn’t out of a vending machine.”
Vivienne managed a thin smile and didn’t take the advice, because there wasn’t time to take the advice, because the discovery request wasn’t going to review itself, and because some small, exhausted part of her had started to suspect that if she stopped moving even for a moment, everything she’d been holding together for the past five years might simply come apart in the silence.
Priya lingered a moment longer, clearly wanting to say something further, then apparently thought better of it and retreated back to her own overflowing desk, leaving Vivienne alone with the discovery binders and the particular, hollowed-out focus of someone running on fumes and habit alone.
By Thursday night, it nearly did.
She was alone in the conference room at eleven p.m., surrounded by exhibit binders stacked three feet high, when her hands started shaking over a document she’d already read twice without absorbing a word of it.
She set down her pen.
Closed her eyes.
Tried to breathe through the particular tightness climbing up her chest, the kind she recognized now, five years and one hidden trauma later, as something closer to panic than exhaustion.
*You’re fine.
You’ve survived worse than a trial week.*
The thought didn’t help the way it usually did.
Her hands kept shaking.
She didn’t hear the door open.
“Vivienne.”
She startled badly enough to knock a stack of papers to the floor, and Zachary crossed the room in three quick strides, crouching to help gather them before she could wave him off.
“I’m fine,” she said, too fast, her voice thinner than she wanted it to be.
“You’re not.” He set the papers on the table, studying her face with a focus that felt, in that moment, almost unbearably exposing.
“How long have you been here.”
“Since seven this morning.”
“That’s sixteen hours.”
“I’m aware of the math, Zachary.”
“When did you last eat.”
“I don’t remember.”
Something shifted in his expression — not the careful professional concern he usually allowed himself, something rawer, closer to the surface than she’d seen from him since the wedding night that started all of this.
“This is my fault,” he said quietly.
“I pushed the workload too hard.
I told myself it was a test.
It wasn’t fair, and I let it go too far.”
“I can handle the work.”
“I know you can.
That was never in question.” He pulled out the chair beside her and sat, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him even through the exhaustion fogging her mind.
“But handling it and doing it at the cost of your own wellbeing aren’t the same thing, and I should have noticed the difference sooner.”
Vivienne felt something crack loose in her chest — not the panic exactly, something adjacent to it, five years of carefully maintained composure straining at the edges of a night too long and too tired to hold it all together anymore.
“I don’t know how to stop,” she admitted, quiet, unguarded in a way she rarely allowed herself to be.
“I haven’t known how to stop since I was nineteen.
If I stop moving, I start thinking, and if I start thinking—”
She didn’t finish the sentence.
She didn’t need to.
Zachary was quiet for a long moment, something careful and pained moving behind his composed expression.
“What happens,” he asked gently, “when you think?”
“Everything I lost.
Everyone who decided I wasn’t worth keeping.
Five years of proving myself to strangers because the people who were supposed to love me unconditionally decided I didn’t deserve it.” Her voice wavered, thin and raw.
“It’s easier to just keep working.
Working doesn’t ask anything of me except more work.
Thinking asks everything.”
“You don’t have to earn the right to rest, Vivienne.
Not from me.
Not from anyone.”
“That’s easy to say.”
“It is,” he agreed.
“It’s harder to believe, especially when everyone in your life up to this point has made you believe otherwise.
I understand that better than you might think.”
Something in his tone caught her attention despite her exhaustion — a weight underneath the words that suggested he wasn’t speaking hypothetically.
She didn’t have the strength to chase it tonight.
She filed it away instead, the way she filed everything else that mattered but couldn’t be dealt with immediately.
Zachary reached over, carefully, and took the pen from her still-trembling hand, setting it down out of reach.
“Not tonight,” he said.
“Whatever’s waiting for you in the stopping, it can wait until morning.
Go home.
Sleep.
The discovery request will still be here tomorrow.”
“The hearing is Friday.”
“I’ll handle what’s left tonight.”
“You have your own—”
“Vivienne.” His voice softened, low and steady, cutting cleanly through her protest.
“Go home.”
She looked at him for a long moment, something unspoken passing between them in the quiet of the empty conference room — not romance, not yet, not exactly, but something close enough to it that her chest ached with the shape of it.
“Okay,” she said finally, quiet.
“Okay.”
She gathered her coat, and at the door, she paused, looking back at him already bent over the binders she’d left behind.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For noticing.”
He didn’t look up, but something in the set of his shoulders eased slightly at the words.
“Someone should have noticed a long time ago,” he said.
“I intend to keep doing it from now on.”
She left before either of them could examine too closely what that promise actually meant.
She slept twelve hours that night, dreamless and heavy, and woke Friday morning to a text from an unfamiliar number she didn’t need to guess the source of.
*Discovery request handled.
Hearing prep complete.
Eat something before you come in.
— Z.K.*
She read it three times, something warm and unfamiliar settling into her chest, before she finally allowed herself a small, tired smile and got up to make breakfast — the first real meal she’d eaten sitting down in longer than she cared to admit.