January 1997

6 weeks earlier

I knew I should have been listening to what she was saying but my mind was wandering shamelessly. I wasn't thinking about the case that we were prepping for trial, or about the twenty phone calls I should have made that day and hadn't gotten around to, or about the fact that Arthur Gold had managed to convince a judge to grant one of his frivolous motions earlier that morning much to my chagrin. No...it was the end of my second week back at the DA's office and all I could think about was getting home to my family.

"So, what do you think?"

Her voice brought me suddenly back into the present moment. "Sorry, what?"

My assistant Vanessa's eyes narrowed. "Ben, have you been listening to anything I've been saying for the last ten minutes?"

"Honestly? No."

She stared at me, clearly surprised by my answer and then her face broke into a smile, "Well at least you're honest."

"Can we pick this up again on Monday?" I asked, gathering up the papers on my desk and putting them to one side for me to reconsider once the next working week had begun.

"Sure," she got to her feet. "Any plans for this weekend?"

"Nothing in particular. Evelyn mentioned about taking Kate swimming again so no doubt we might do that."

"You said she loved it the last time."

"She did." I switched off my desk lamp and moved over to the coat stand, the image of my baby daughter splashing in the water, her face full of nothing but joy, flashing suddenly through my mind and spurring me even more to get home. "Pamela's going out on a date," I added as a sudden afterthought.

"Ooh..." Vanessa looked at me sympathetically. "Her first?"

"Well the first she's told us about and the first one who's coming to the apartment to collect her."

"Oh, that's nice. I like chivalrous men."

I shivered slightly at the thought of describing anyone my teenage daughter could be dating as a man. "Let's just pretend he's a boy, ok?"

"Ok," she grinned as we reached the elevator. "I'll finish up that brief and leave it on your desk before I go home."

"Vanessa, it's after six on a Friday night. Leave the brief until Monday and go home to your own family."

"You know..." she cocked her head to one side, "People told me that you could be a difficult guy to work with at times but, honestly, I'm not seeing it."

I smiled as the doors opened and I stepped inside, "Be grateful you weren't working for me ten years ago." The doors slid shut and I let out a long, decompressing breath as the car descended down to the lobby. She was right to be surprised. I knew myself how people in the office had often viewed me. A hard taskmaster who expected great things from his assistants and demanded the best work and, to an extent, I could admit that I was still that way inclined. But things seemed very different now than they ever had before.

As I walked outside into the cold evening air, I couldn't help but compare my life now with what it had been when my eldest children were small. In my thirties I had been so desperate to build my career, to succeed, to do well, to impress whomever happened to be sitting in the DA's chair and I had had a wife who didn't work so I could afford to work long hours and holidays and weekends and knew that my children were well cared for. My dedication had ultimately ruined my first marriage but, at the time, it had certainly seemed worth it until I had realised that I barely knew my children and, worse, they didn't want to spend any time with me.

Things seemed so different now. Peter was six months into his first year at Michigan, loving the freedom that being an adult was bringing him and yet his tone on the phone occasionally sounded somewhat wistful, as though he was homesick but trying not to show it. When I had dropped him at the airport after Christmas for his return flight, he had hugged me tighter than I think he had ever hugged me. It had certainly been a different farewell from when I had taken him to his dorm the first weekend before classes began and he was desperate for me to leave lest I cramped his style. Pamela was becoming more and more independent, not to mention moody, by the day and was already considering where she might like to eventually study, though her mind had definitely been more on the opposite sex of late. When I had spoken to their mother about both of them over the holidays, Laura had told me that I needed to let them both grow up and that if I interfered too much, they would simply rebel. I had refrained from getting into an argument with her about it. Things between us had been fairly stable for some time now and rocking the boat was the last thing I wanted to do.

I managed to hail a cab easily, despite the weather and the traffic, and as I sat back in the seat for the journey home, all I could think about was how much I wanted to see my family. Although Evelyn had never put any conditions on my returning to the DA's office, I had made several of my own, including that I was going to try my hardest to be home at a reasonable hour every night. I didn't want Kate to ever feel the way that I knew her brother and sister had felt in years gone by and I had no intention of ruining my second marriage, especially not after everything we had already been through.

It took less time than I expected to get home and, when I did, I immediately felt the stresses of work melt away. I was home and nothing else mattered now except family. I could hear the sound of the radio coming from the kitchen intermingled with periodic squeals of delight and when I walked in I saw Kate sat in her highchair gleefully moving spaghetti around on the tray and laughing to herself.

"Hi sweetie," I greeted her, kissing the top of her head. "Wow that looks good." She looked up at me and grinned, proudly displaying all of her four front teeth. "Where's Mama?"

"Here...sorry, I needed to pee and now seemed as good a time as any." Evelyn appeared beside me, her hair scraped back, her face devoid of makeup, splashes of sauce on her sweater and yet, she couldn't have looked more perfect to me. "How was your day?"

"Fine," I replied, kissing her quickly. "I had a motion hearing with Arthur Gold so, you can imagine..."

"I can and I sympathise. You sure you have no regrets about leaving Columbia?"

"Not so far. How was your day?"

"Good," she nodded. "I managed to make some phone calls and do some work while she was napping earlier but, if I'm being honest, I'm not sure this working from home thing is going to be successful long term."

"How come?"

She shrugged. "I can't really concentrate when I'm here. I'd rather spend my time with this little one so I end up doing less than half of what I need to get done. I'm thinking I might be better asking Marion if I can go down to three days. What do you think?"

I slid my arm around her waist, "I think you need to do what you feel is best."

"It would mean less money..."

"The money doesn't matter," I reassured her. "I want you to be happy."

"I am happy," she looked up at me. "The fact that I can work a few days a week and spend time with Kate is great and, by all accounts, she's loving daycare..."

"What?" I asked as she trailed off.

"I don't know...I guess that I don't want you to think that I don't want to stay at home with her all the time. I don't want you to think that I'm not being a good mom because I work too."

I turned her to face me, hating the fact that she might be doubting herself for a decision that had been made in order to preserve the good state of her mental health. "We talked about this, remember? You said right at the beginning that you thought it would be good for you to work part time and I agreed. I've never once said that I thought you should stay at home. I know it's tough looking after this one all day."

"I know, but Laura..."

"Don't compare yourself to her," I said firmly. "Look how that turned out for all of us."

"You're right. I know you're right."

"Of course I am," I bent to kiss her, lingering a little too long. "We'll have the place pretty much to ourselves later..."

"I can't wait," she laughed, kissing me back. "We won't have to worry about noise travelling."

"Oh, speaking of which..." it wasn't a direct lead in but it was the next best thing. "I got this through today."

I watched as she scanned the piece of paper I had retrieved from my pocket, her eyes flitting across each line towards the bottom of the page, her lashes slowly blinking and her eyebrows rising as she reached the end before she raised her head to look at me. Something told me I wasn't about to get the reaction I had hoped for.

"You're not serious."

"What? That was the cheapest quote out of the three!"

"And it's extortionate!"

"Well we're not talking about a two bed walk up here, Evelyn. We're talking about renovating a whole house."

"Not for this price we're not. That quote is out by a good couple of thousand at least!"

I took the paper from her and looked at it again, the figures jumbling before my eyes as I surveyed the breakdown and then focused on the final figure. I had to admit that it was high but, as I had said, I'm not sure what else she had expected. "So it's a no?"

"It's a definite no," she replied, lifting a cloth, wiping Kate's face and hands and then lifting off the tray and depositing it in the sink. "I thought the point was to try to spend as little money as possible?"

"Of course, in an ideal world but...come on, we have to spend something. The house isn't going to fix itself."

"No, I suppose not." She turned on the hot water and stood watching as it flowed into the sink and over the tray.

I could feel her trepidation. "You don't want to do this, do you?"

"I didn't say that."

"I can tell by your whole body language. Are you having second thoughts?"

"No...I guess it's just..." she turned to face me. "I guess I thought we would never actually see the sale go through. I guess I thought someone else would get there before us, or that the mortgage wouldn't be approved. I wasn't sure we'd ever be in the position of actually having to consider renovating."

I could understand where she was coming from. From showing her the house in the Hudson Valley that afternoon back in September after Elizabeth and Mike's wedding, it had taken a lot of legal wrangling, not to mention a heap of stress with the mortgage application, right up until the end of the year to successfully secure it. Now that we had, the task before us was to set about making it a home for our family, something that I had to admit I was secretly relishing.

"Ok," I said, "we'll go back to the drawing board, look at some other contractors and see if we can't get a cheaper quote."

"I'm sorry, I don't mean to be a killjoy," she crossed over the room and kissed me gently. "It's just such a big project and, I'll be honest, it scares me a little. What if it all goes wrong and we end up penniless and out on the streets?"

"I promise you that is not going to happen," I said, putting my arms around her as the front door banged shut. "I would never see any of you out in the cold."

"Who's cold?" Pamela asked, coming into the kitchen and tossing her bag onto the floor. "Is dinner ready yet? I'm starving."

"Nice to see you too," I greeted her, "How was your day Dad? Oh it was fine honey, how about yours?"

She rolled her heavily mascara-ed eyes at me from under the thick bangs she had had styled into her hair some months earlier. That and her penchant for dressing entirely in black made her look somewhat menacing, though she hadn't taken the comment well when I had originally made it. "Sorry, I didn't realise we had to do a whole Walton-esque style greeting every time we came home."

"I thought you were going out for dinner tonight?" Evelyn said.

"No, we're only going to the movies. He's not picking me up until seven-thirty."

"Well it's spaghetti. Is that on your approved list of foods this week?"

"Fine..." Pamela let out an over-exaggerated sigh. "I'm going to get changed."

"You'd think she'd be excited about going out on her date," I observed as she flounced out of the room and into her bedroom, banging the door behind her. "What do we know about this guy anyway?"

"Only that his name's Andrew and they met at art class."

"Hmm...maybe I should have a talk with him when he gets here."

"Maybe you should do no such thing," Evelyn warned me. "She's sixteen, Ben."

"Exactly! I don't want him thinking that he can tell us that he's taking her to the movies when he's really taking her somewhere to, well, you know..."

"Have sex?"

I blushed and squirmed at the thought, "Something like that." Reaching over, I unclipped Kate from her seat and lifted her into my arms. "This one isn't going to be allowed out until she's thirty."

"By which time you'll be in your eighties and most likely unable to take on anyone."

"Don't you believe it," I replied, "I'll still be able to defend this family, walking stick, wheelchair...whatever."

She came forward and kissed me on the cheek. "Yes Papa Bear. Why don't you go and wash up and then we can have dinner before Pam's date gets here? It'll give you a chance to prepare your cross."

"Fine," I made a face at her and then handed Kate over. "Oh, I lifted the mail on my way up and there's a letter there for you. I left it on the coffee table."

She turned back to the sink. "Great, thanks."

As I approached the bathroom, Pamela came flying out of her room and rushed past me, closing the door firmly behind her in a gesture that indicated she could, and would, be some time. "Perfect," I mumbled to myself as I loosened my tie and headed for the bedroom instead thinking, not for the first time, how trying it could be living with three women. "I'll just pee out of the window."