This was the most important interview of her life, and Judith could barely focus. Not that she needed to—the questions were all rote, and she could answer them in her sleep.

Until he threw a curveball.

"Are you sure you want to go into prosecution? It's just, most people with a brother like yours would be more interested in defense."

Judith clenched her jaw, doing her best not to snap at Worthington that he knew nothing about Fisk. But instead, "Maybe less kids would become criminals at fourteen if we got criminals off the streets before they could start recruiting," she said calmly. She didn't say that she'd throw a case without even questioning it if she doubted the defendant's guilt enough.

Worthington seemed to hear it anyway, though he did say, "I think you'll be a good fit for the prosecutor's office, Miss Fisk."

-.-.-.-

Judith held her phone between her shoulder and her ear as she let herself into her apartment. "Anna," she said.

"—and you wouldn't believe Lissy's latest obsession," Anna continued. "She's convinced her friend is in love with a black lesbian lawyer ghost."

Lissy fixated on things with remarkable tenacity for someone who fell in love with something - a song from any number of genres both mainstream and obscure, a truly awful movie where straight white people inevitably shared an angsty kiss in the rain, a colour, a poet... she'd channeled her love for detective stories and archaeology and for science and for, of all things, dissection (the months after she first dissected a frog were the worst, and Judith still refused to eat chicken off the bone) into a forensic pathology major.

The detective stories were Judith's fault, admittedly. She'd devoured Holmes stories as a child and read them to Lissy well before Lissy was ready to become fascinated with crime. Archaeology was all on Fisk, and science was their father's influence. Her love for pretty things was from Anna's influence.

So a tragic supernatural love story was hardly news, and Judith was exhausted.

"Anna," said Judith. "I just got home, I have to go."

"All right," Anna sighed.

"Tell the children I say hello," said Judith.

Anna hummed. "And Max, right? He already thinks you don't like him, Judith."

Max was a rich guy from the sort of family that probably held the Roosevelt family in reverence and almost definitely patronized ridiculous, gentrified boutiques in bad neighborhoods. But he was a decent man, who loved Anna and their two children and only sometimes got judgmental about their estranged gay felon of a brother.

"And Max," Judith acknowledged. "Goodbye, Anna."

"I love you," said Anna, because she was the sort of person who shared those 'tag people you love' posts on facebook and tagged her entire friend's list.

"I love you too," said Judith.

She ate leftover takeout and watched her favorite Elementary episode when she'd gone through her usual routine of coming home - keys in the bowl on top of the table by the door, formal clothes back on their hangers, dishwasher filled with her lunch containers, pyjamas donned.

Robotic and brutally effective, yet enthusiastic, her favorite professor had said about her address of mock-courts.

The fact was, Judith had a life plan. A carefully built map that would get her through her life, and the minutia of every day included in it. Fisk had stopped being part of her plans years ago.

And yet she'd ended up at his wedding reception.

-.-.-.-

That night, Judith dreamt that she walked into the courtroom to find Fisk in handcuffs and Max in his robes and Kathryn on the witness stand, explaining some forensics and concluding, "—therefore I believe Mr. Fisk was responsible for the murders."

She woke up in a cold sweat when dream-Max called on her to cross-examine the defendant.