Judgment

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A perfect May night in Chicago, warm but not quite balmy. A soft breeze coming in off the lake, carrying with it the faint murmurings of traffic from Michigan Avenue twenty floors below. Juliana was sitting alone on one end of a couch on the Peninsula’s rooftop terrace, still wearing her conference lanyard, still wired from the speech she had given two hours earlier. She’d delivered a talk on the rules of evidence in front of five hundred people, and it had gone really well. She tended to be self-critical, but she also knew when she’d hit a home run. “Rules of evidence” wasn’t exactly a sexy topic, but she had her own take on it, and people seemed to respond.

She’d just had a drink with six fellow attendees, all judges from Indiana, and she was talked out. Mostly she’d been the center of attention, which was flattering for a while, and then exhausting. For now, she wanted to sit by herself — not in her room, with CNN keeping her company, but out here on the terrace in the refreshing breeze off Lake Michigan. Be in her own head. She dropped her lanyard on the glass-topped coffee table and scanned an array of magazines fanned out in front of her. One caught her eye — a travel magazine with a cover story about Spain — and she started leafing through it, keeping one eye out for a server.

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