Confessions of an Accidental Lawyer

by Michael Stockham

Hannah searches my face. “Do you think I’m being selfish wanting another baby?” “No, Buzz. Dreams are not selfish. Dreams make life worth living.” I squeeze her hand to reassure her. Her warm, slender fingers are interlaced with mine. She leans against me, drinking in my strength. I won’t let her down.

Dr. Abrams says, “I’ve seen a lot of dark days in this business, Hannah. You just have to believe in the next sunrise.”

“You never ask a question on cross-examination to which you don’t know the answer. You never ask why? Or how? Anything open ended. You lose complete control of the witness.”

I’m not a fan of Dr. Phillips’s bedside manner. I fume in silence, but I can’t blame him; he has done nothing wrong. He has been honest in his opinion and is trying to help. But as he walks away, fury wells up inside me. Healing is not merely science—it’s also art, intention, and faith.

We’re now buried in debt. All our money evaporates into paying it off. We have developed a system where, beyond our cars, mortgage, and utilities, we budget $25.00 for every day and track it religiously in the pages of a notebook. We have big loans to pay off. Spending money while chasing a dream is easy because hope exists. The excitement blinds you. Paying off debts after a failure feels like an endless ditch you fill one shovel full at a time.

God and I have a rocky relationship. He took my mother when I was six years old. When we left the church that morning after the eulogy, my father left the Church for good. Religion at the dinner table was mostly the target of derision. But being angry at something does not mean it does not exist. It mostly means you have cut yourself off. Alone in the lot under a clear October sky, I say the prayer I told Lilly when Hannah was in surgery in Ithaca, “You will always be safe, and I will always love you.” And I say a simple prayer for my wife and unborn daughter. “Please protect them.”

“Yeah, well . . . who knows if there will be a next time? Or if there is, when it will be. Crazy thing is . . . I keep wondering what we said that made that one juror hang with us. If we knew that, we might have hammered on that point. Who knows how many other jurors we could have brought along to our side?”

At the top, in the FORTUNE masthead, is a saying by Fyodor Dostoevsky: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”