She wanted something for herself; something that wasn't tainted like everything else in her life because he had touched it. She wanted something to match the woman that she was, that she hadn't been for him. Leaving her job, raising the children, posing in the endless pictures, offering sound bites for the endless puff pieces about the State Attorney's wife – those were things she had done for him, but it wasn't the woman that she was, it was the woman she had made herself to fit into the boxes she had thought she wanted to fit in at the time. The time had passed, and now she could look back and see how confining, how small, her life with him had been.
She wanted something for herself; that would match the woman she was struggling to become. Something he could never touch or take away from her. She had looked at some of the men at the firm, strong lawyer-type men had always been her taste before. But somehow, it all reminded her of his voice on the audio tape begging that hooker. That's what the type of men she'd thought she'd liked before did, and so it wouldn't suit as that special something for herself. That shining glowing thing she would be able to hold inside locked within her ribcage, safe from harm and taint.
Sitting at her desk late into the night, staring down at the case files in front of her until they became abstract patterns that were divorced from their corporeal context; she contemplated what it was that she wanted – certainly never to have to lie on that cold mattress in that hideous conjugal room at the prison again. She never wanted to listen to comforting lies again. The woman she was now could take the truth, even when it cut and made her bleed; this woman welcomed the truth, not as a martyr but with the courage of her convictions. The list of what she didn't want was certainly longer then the list of what she did, but no less precise.
She wanted Kalinda.