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The Judge’s Daughter

Cotton O’Connell

The first thing Haley knew for sure was that her father was bigger than the world. It was obvious from how she was warned not to disturb him, ever, in his office; from how the minister at church held his hand for longer than necessary during the peace; from how her second grade teacher stuttered and blushed when he visited the class to talk about what it was like being a judge.

Though she didn’t exactly doubt the consensus, Haley was less awestruck by him than everyone else. To her, he was just a dad, and dads were uninteresting unless they were funny. (Hers definitely wasn’t funny.) He was pale with watery blue-gray eyes, a pointy nose that looked too small for his face, and a receding hairline—not handsome with strong features like she felt an important person should have, though at least he was tall and not fat.

As a young child, she knew his life didn’t orbit around hers like her mother’s did, that his mind was filled with bigger things than pickups and dropoffs, playdates, and registration deadlines for soccer and swim lessons. The scarcity of his attention made her older brothers, Rory and Casey, seem to want it all the more, but it repelled her.

To his credit, he never held it against her. When she was five and he taught her to bike, he demonstrated the unwavering patience and stoicism she later came to understand were his superpower. He coached her soccer team when she was six and read Shakespearian tragedies to her at bedtime when she was eight, stopping to explain the meaning of words only when he felt her understanding of the plot demanded it.

She only became sure of how fiercely she loved him in the spring of her first year of high school, when he was nominated to the Supreme Court. At first, this development had minimal effect on her. She was focused on her own life: her grades, her friends, her lightly supervised weekends away with the Model UN team, her first boyfriend. Since she had always expected her father to keep rising, it seemed basically unremarkable.

In her memory, that period of breezy indifference seems to have lasted for months, but it was less than a week before the first accuser came forward. The heavyset woman, who wore too much makeup and whose mouth turned up at the corners in an unpleasant, smirking way, alleged that Haley’s father, who had been her friend, had sex with her in college when she was unconscious.

The story was easy to dismiss. There were the small details the woman had excavated from her memory—his bloodshot eyes, his sour breath, the caramel popcorn he ate as a late-night snack, Van Halen playing on the bar’s jukebox before it all went south—that should have been impossible to resurrect three decades later. Haley’s mother and brothers helped Haley see them as the contribution of professional storytellers who had coached the woman.

There was also the portrayal of her dad as a sex-obsessed frat boy type, which didn’t square with how Haley had heard him described. Without money to fall back on, he’d been disciplined: studying until all hours of the night, then chopping vegetables and batch-cooking pasta by day for his campus cafeteria job when he wasn’t in class. Invisible to classmates in the wood-paneled dining hall, who lingered over rice pudding and second cups of coffee under the vaulted ceiling. People who interacted with him as a teenager vouched for the fact that Haley’s sweater-vest–wearing dad, who pretended his hobby was golf when it was really work and more work, and who only ever drank single-malt Scotch (and never more than one in an evening), had always been tightly wound.

His defenders left it to the online trolls to tease out another point shattering the woman’s credibility: she wasn’t the judge’s type. The idea gained traction through viral memes that showed side-by-side college photos of Haley’s perfectly proportioned mother and the woman, who was no beauty even then.

But the media fell into a frenzy over each new accuser. The second one said he groped her breasts in high school at a cast party for the school musical. The third said he reached under her skirt at a law school party and grabbed under her panties. The giveaways in these stories were the evil grin and the maniacal laugh. If the accusations weren’t so over-the-top, Haley might have had to consider whether they were true. She already understood teenage boys well enough to know they could turn feral at the faintest whiff of opportunity, then return to their bored, disinterested selves almost as quickly.

She was relieved when her parents suggested she stay home from school until the Senate hearings were over, since school had gotten worse by the day. Her father’s voice, normally metronomically steady, was cracking during endless strategy calls, and her mother was hardly speaking at all. But since she didn’t want to be another problem for them to manage, she would have stuck it out. Friends she had known since elementary school were burying their faces in their lockers as she passed. Many had been guests at barbecues where Haley’s father manned the grill and charmed their parents, or been coached by him in soccer. They had buzzed with pride when he complimented them on a good pass or a near-save. (He always saved his highest praise for the kids who weren’t athletically gifted, but tried hard). Her boyfriend, whose father had been a lawyer in the previous presidential administration, stopped answering her texts. Some of her teachers even had trouble looking her in the eye.

A few friends stuck by her, and there were also the kids she barely knew, who were fans of the current president and wanted to tell her whose side they were on. Some of them had made their adoration of the president central to their identity, wearing his campaign apparel in their selfies and championing his less controversial ideas, while others were quieter about what they thought. A few in that second group asked to keep their support private, since the school was run by liberals, and they didn’t want their teachers and guidance counselors to be biased against them when it was time to write college recommendations.

She was grateful to the normal ones for revealing themselves but wished the fanatics would leave her alone, since being seen with them would only confirm what most people in school now thought about her. She didn’t want to be associated with the president, who she thought was crude and misogynistic and an embarrassment. So did her father, who, before the elderly justice announced her retirement and created the vacancy he had been waiting for, had said so many times.

Their house felt like a bunker when the Senate hearings began, though the protesters outside were still a small, local group. Haley recognized the older woman with dyed purple hair, who sometimes walked the streets of their town center with signs denouncing factory farming and nuclear proliferation. On days when Haley had to wait for a ride home during middle school, they had sometimes tossed bread crumbs together at the duck pond. She wondered if the woman remembered this as she hoisted an “I Believe Survivors” sign in Haley’s cul-de-sac.

Her father watched the hearings in the living room with the cadre of advisers who descended on the house every day, including the Svengali who was credited with getting the president elected. He had unruly eyebrows and coffee-stained teeth and wore oversize polo shirts that billowed over his ample stomach, in contrast to the rest of the impeccably groomed and tailored group, but they deferred to him. It was clear from the way her father looked at this man that he despised him, but it was also obvious, even to Haley, that they needed him on their side, that he understood how to move public opinion in a visceral way the suits didn’t.

Haley and her mother and brothers were confined to the second floor of the house except during lunchtime. They watched the hearings in the master bedroom, sprawled across the California king bed in various configurations. Mostly in silence, though the boys breathed heavily like angry bulls. Haley’s mother was perfectly quiet. During the worst moments, she squeezed Haley’s hand as if it were a synthetic stress ball, not flesh and blood. Haley concentrated on tolerating the pain, keeping her hand and face still.

Only the first woman—the law professor who started this—was easy to hate. Unlike her brothers, who loathed all three women equally, Haley thought it was possible the second and third were confusing her father with someone else. They were obviously terrified, and Haley could read ambivalence in their expressions about whether this sacrifice—of their privacy, their dignity—was even worth it. But there was no sign of ambivalence in the first woman. It would have been impossible to understand what could motivate someone to lie on such a grand scale, if her father hadn’t already explained it.

He had known the woman and been her friend, just as she said. They gravitated toward each other because they had much in common: a capacity for single-minded focus, a desire to study the law, and, perhaps most important in the elite institution in which they found themselves, humble beginnings. They were from wildly different places, he from California’s Central Valley, she from East Harlem. It was hard for him to imagine her life in the one-bedroom apartment she shared with her mother and siblings, but he still found her easier to relate to than the prep-school kids who dominated campus life, who were counting on grade inflation and family connections to help them assume their rightful places in society.

It was an important friendship for him during the brief time it lasted. They took some of the same classes and got into the habit of studying together. If they were both studying late, they got food at a greasy spoon near campus or smoked cigarettes in the courtyard of her dorm. (He mumbled the part about cigarettes, visibly embarrassed. For years, Haley would look back on this as proof he had told the truth. If this was the part he was ashamed of, he couldn’t have done the rest.) On colder nights when they were forced indoors, they sometimes had beers in her common room, if one of her suitemates was around to offer one.

It was during the second semester of their sophomore year, just before midterms, that the friendship ended. They were eating noodle soup at the counter of a quick-service Chinese restaurant, where they were usually the only sober customers, when she started to cry. He asked what was wrong, imagining something awful, and she admitted to having feelings for him. She knew he wouldn’t feel the same, but it had to be said. Once she was finished, she reached into her wallet for the money she owed and left the restaurant while he was still grasping for something better to say than “You hid it well.”

They never spoke again, which he wasn’t proud of. In fact, it shamed him more than any judgment he ever rendered or opinion he ever wrote. He knew he was being awful, that the person he wanted to be would find a way to communicate that he cared, but as the days turned into weeks, he convinced himself that approaching her would be like rubbing the scab off a wound.

Weeks passed, then months, and he stopped worrying about it. Coming face to face with her caused temporary discomfort, but he followed her lead and pretended not to know her anymore. His own wound, if he was allowed to call it that, was allowed to cauterize.

The last time he saw her was at graduation, when they were both onstage to accept an award for academic performance, the two of them out of a half dozen high achievers in their class. During the commencement speaker’s long-winded talk, he decided he would congratulate his old friend. Then it was time to collect their awards (a professor introduced them one at a time). He clapped for her so hard his hands hurt, then waited to catch her eye as she returned to her seat. Their eyes locked for the first time in two years, and the look she gave was of pure hatred.

It was unsettling to be looked at like that, but he told himself it was the stress of the day and nothing to do with him, and he got over it quickly. She was headed to a different law school anyway. He kept tabs on her over the years and knew she had clerked for a well-known appellate judge, then gone into private practice and become a law professor at a state university in the Midwest. It sounded smaller than what she once hoped for, but maybe that meant she was happy, he thought, since people sometimes became less ambitious if they had a satisfying private life. (It didn’t have to be said that he wasn’t one of those people.)

When he read her interview in The New York Times, where she told her version of the truth to the world, he immediately thought of that look as she walked to her seat, when her back was turned to their classmates and families. He realized this had been a long time coming and thought of Galatians 6:7—do not be deceived, God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap—and the correctness of it. For as angry as he could be about the commingling of politics and revenge that had motivated her attack, he also had to be angry at himself. If he hadn’t been cruel and avoided dozens of opportunities to put things right, none of this would be happening. It was a lesson he wanted his children to learn, that kindness mattered. Even through the most self-interested lens, it actually did.

Some parts of their stories matched, but not many. During her Senate testimony, the law professor also spoke of meeting Haley’s father during their freshman year and having a connection with him, as two ambitious outsiders. She mentioned late nights in the library and off-campus burgers at one a.m. Then she described a deep admiration for him that was practically awe, of feeling that his productivity was superhuman, as if he could stretch time and get thirty-six hours out of everyone else’s twenty-four. There came a point when she realized her feelings were romantic, but it felt like something she could live with, nothing terminal.

Because of his epic productivity, he also found time for parties. He would tell her about the girls he kissed and, on the rarest of occasions, brought home. If she had known better, the dismissive way he spoke about these girls would have been a red flag.

Then came the night that severed her from her life. They studied in the library, then went out for Chinese food. He ordered his usual beef chow fun, but something was off. He was livid about something but wouldn’t say what. (To this day, only he would know.) She had stopped trying to get it out of him and was quietly eating her noodles, thinking of bed, when he asked, suddenly energized, if they could go out for drinks. She wanted to be a good friend, but that wasn’t the whole reason she agreed. Truthfully, it was nice to be asked.

So they went to a dive bar, hazy with cigarette smoke, and ate Belgian frites and drank beer. He wasn’t talkative but seemed determined to get drunk, pouring himself pint after pint from the pitchers he bought. She drank less, but it didn’t take much; the alcohol made it easy to paper over her bad feeling.

On the walk back to campus, she was unsteady on her feet and couldn’t feel the cold of the February night. He put his arm around her shoulders to keep her from weaving across the sidewalk. It was thrilling to her—not so much the physical contact, but the idea of presenting as a couple. She told herself to bottle up the moment and save it for later. When he mentioned his roommate was away for a track meet and she should sleep in the empty bed, since their dorm was closer, it sounded logical.

Only fragments of memory remained intact from the rest of the night. She remembered changing into the T-shirt and boxer shorts he offered and getting into the lower bunk, where she must have fallen asleep right away. Then waking up with a body on top of her, still over the covers at that point, pinning her down. She had no idea where she was until she heard his voice telling her to relax. Then she remembered him holding her by the neck as he moved to yank the quilt away, pulling down her boxer shorts and thrusting his fingers into her. Then she dissolved into the darkness.

The law professor preempted the antagonistic senators by acknowledging she hadn’t said no. It had felt like she was operating on a delay, processing what was happening with a minute or two of lag time. She was struggling the whole time to catch up. There was no mental or physical capacity left for resisting.

When she woke up the next morning at dawn, he was snoring softly in the upper bunk. Her privates felt sore, but possibly just from what she remembered him doing with his fingers. (She put thoughts of what else he might have done after she blacked out aside; they would be picked up later.) She found her clothes on the roommate’s desk chair and quietly put them on. His mattress springs creaked when she was almost ready to leave, and she saw his eyes glinting in the pale light. They looked at each other for a few seconds, and what he saw must have alarmed him. Then he said, matter-of-factly, “I thought this was what you wanted.” It was the last thing he ever said to her.

Haley’s father had warned them that the professor was brilliant and would be convincing. It was obvious, even on TV, that half the senators and most of the gallery were moved by her. But to Haley and her family, who knew all his public achievements in addition to a thousand private moments of kindness and thoughtfulness, the success of the woman’s presentation made her lies all the more obscene.

After the woman’s testimony concluded, when the boys were ranting about her wickedness and their mother was in the bathtub (where she was spending hours at a time, ever since the law professor came forward), Haley asked herself if they were being objective. The answer, after flipping through the facts, was still yes. The main point that anchored her confidence, which the Svengali was amplifying in the press, was that no one could corroborate the law professor’s story. She had told a couple of friends in recent years, when the judge’s name had started to circulate as a future Supreme Court pick. The only person she claimed to have told contemporaneously was a roommate who died of ovarian cancer at thirty.

Then the day arrived for them to go to the Capitol to watch her father testify. The president’s fixers wanted a say in what they would wear and even the order they would sit in, but her mother, usually so deferential to people from her father’s work, rejected their advice without her usual courtesy, then took two Valium and went to bed early. Haley ended up choosing her own outfit: a white blouse and a dark pencil skirt, with her hair lacquered into a tight bun and her diamond-studded cross on a gold chain around her neck.

When Haley thinks back on that day, she sees what the world saw. The endlessly-memed footage of her father, red-faced and sweaty like a cartoon villain, as he answers questions from senators in the minority party about his teenage sex life. Her mother cradling Haley’s hand in her lap, mirror images of each other with faces like cold marble. Her brothers flanking them, snarling like rabid dogs.

It sometimes feels as if she were photo-shopped into the scene with her image manipulated to serve various agendas. What she actually thought and felt that day is sealed off forever, even to her. There was the Lolita version, with the dusting of freckles and hint of cleavage that certain male corners of the internet frothed over. (One particular image, where her mouth was parted like a cam girl’s, trailed her into adulthood. She would find it on the wall of a frat house bathroom, in an open browser tab on a co-worker’s laptop, and other humiliating places.) Then there was the daughter-of-an-American-patriot version, held up alongside her mother as exemplars of what real women should be, defiant but feminine. Finally, there was the smug brat version, happy to sanitize a monster’s image because she would always have access to an abortion and money for college, no matter how he voted on the Court.

Then it was over, and her father was confirmed by a six-vote margin, which was a comfortable berth considering the intensity of partisan politics. Two members of the minority party even switched sides to vote for him.

They were finally allowed to celebrate at home, with no Svengali hovering. Haley’s mother made beef Wellington and baked Alaska, and Haley was allowed a glass of champagne. Incandescently happy at the head of the table, her father told them not to waste time thinking of inconsequential people.

It wasn’t as easy as he told her it would be, though the transition back to school was okay. Hardly anyone averted their eyes from her anymore. But home was different because of the swelling ranks of protesters outside.

Holding signs that depicted Haley’s father with devil horns and dollar signs in his eyes, along with other slogans they copied from each other, they were mostly women, though some of the loudest and most obnoxious were men. Even when they weren’t chanting into bullhorns or forming a drum circle, Haley could feel their vibration through the walls, like an army of wasps amassing in greater and greater numbers. Despite the large presence of police and marshals outside, Haley worried about someone slipping through the security perimeter and hiding in the hedges until the cops cleared everyone out for the night. After the lights went out, every creak in the house sounded like the stealthy footsteps of someone who hadn’t been content to lend their voice to the collective, who wanted their specific grievance to be heard. She started swiping Valium from her mother’s medicine cabinet to get to sleep.

One night, when the crowds were peaking, her father came to check on Haley in her room, where she was trying to concentrate on homework. When he kissed the top of her head, she had the instinct to throw open her shade so they could see who he really was before remembering he could truly care less about them. They were only nuisance noise, hardly worse than leaf blowers, because they couldn’t take his job or his freedom. All they could do was yell—which, he pointed out beatifically, they had the constitutional right to do.

Three weeks later, it was basically done. They arrived in diminishing numbers until only a few local cranks remained, including the lady from the duck pond. Haley periodically gave her the finger from the dining room window, and the woman blew kisses.

Everyone else returned to normal: her father, preparing for the Court’s upcoming term; Rory, in Poland for the summer doing field research; Casey, interning in a congressman’s office; and their mother, doing whatever she did that kept her endlessly busy. Haley tried to be productive. She took a summer class at the local college, swam competitively for a team, volunteered for a literacy program—but she still had too much downtime and spent most of it on her phone.

Her thoughts often drifted to the law professor, who was far from inconsequential, no matter what her father wanted to think. She was building a substantial brand for herself: publishing essays in prestigious outlets (and talking not only about Haley’s father, but other experiences with misogyny, racism, and fatphobia), winning praise from celebrities in their social media, and being photographed in colorful designer clothes while emerging from dinner with Oprah. She had lost, but she wasn’t acting like it. She was thriving.

Haley didn’t realize her obsession was a problem until an afternoon, much like any other, when she opened her laptop to read the latest articles about the professor on Google News. As usual, the mainstream press was admiring beneath its thin veneer of neutrality, while conservative media brought her fame-mongering and grifting to light. It was these stories that most interested Haley, but they led to murkier places, through a warren of conspiracy theories and smears that not even she, predisposed to believe the worst of the professor, could believe. But she couldn’t stop clicking. Somewhere in that morass, Haley opened a link that promised—and delivered—the professor’s contact information. Then she zoomed in on a screenshot of the professor’s email signature. Then she entered the professor’s personal cell number into her iPhone.

It seemed unlikely the number was still active, but the slim chance of speaking directly to the professor and potentially catching her so off guard that she was unable to lie as fluently as usual was too tempting to resist. Haley kept telling herself she would hang up, first when the phone rang, then when the automated voicemail message played. Every additional few seconds she stayed on the line felt dangerous but thrilling, like a round of Russian roulette.

The instant she hung up, much too late, after she had talked and talked and talked, she knew she was fucked. The woman, or whoever was on the receiving end, would surely leak the recording to the press. For days, she waited, staying off her phone as much as possible and reading fantasy novels in her room. She flinched every time her mother knocked on her door, thinking the news had dropped and everyone she knew had a text or a push notification linked to a story about her. Her voice echoed in her head: the things she knew she’d said—liar, fraud, failure—and worse things she couldn’t be sure she hadn’t said, since the call had been made in a red haze. But she finished her stack of books and nothing happened. The anxiety shadowed her for a few months until she eventually got reabsorbed into her life.

The next few years were good to Haley. She kept her grades up, was captain of the swim team and co-captain of the debate team, and played violin in a chamber music group. She had a close group of girlfriends and two boyfriends whose parents worked in finance and didn’t care about politics. She was admitted to one of her top-choice colleges. The protesters came in waves when her father ruled with the majority on decisions unpopular with the blue-haired, pronoun-conscious crowd, but she no longer feared them.

When she was seventeen, her father asked her to join him on his first summer lecture tour in Europe. Over hotel breakfasts and dinners in Michelin-starred restaurants, they talked about cases he had ruled on, and he treated it as a teaching moment when she disagreed. It bothered her that he and his colleagues had felt qualified to rescind a right that most women believed was secure—and just like that, with a flick of their pens. He explained, with his eloquence that could feel like a steel barricade, impossible to break through or even leave an impression on, that the previous case had been wrongly decided, and it was fundamentally a matter for states to take up. Haley was unsatisfied, but his argument had a pleasing shape and a solidness she couldn’t find her way around.

She left for college in New England and did well. She was happy, striking a healthy balance between academics and her social life. She planned to go to law school straight after graduation.

Then, one evening during her junior year, it happened. It was different from how she thought these things occurred. She had been drinking, but not very much; she was still in control of her body, her thoughts. There were five of them in the econ study group, and beers had been cracked open. Then there were four, then three, then two. They moved from the common area of his suite to his bedroom to watch a YouTube video of an obscure comedian on his computer screen. She had perched lightly on the edge of his bed, waiting for a polite amount of time to pass so she could leave, while he howled with laughter from his desk chair.

She had underestimated him, viewing him the way girls like her often saw funny but overweight boys: as a court jester figure, desexed, accepting of the reality that they don’t stand a chance. She didn’t see who he really was until he turned and pinned her to the bed. If only she had been wearing the skinny jeans she habitually wore, the ones her parents liked to joke looked painted on. But she had worn sweatpants that night (there had been no one to impress), and they were easily pulled off.

There was the before and the after, as she came to think of how her life had forked. In the before, she had been disciplined—not to the degree her father was, because she was standing on his shoulders and didn’t need to be, but in the ballpark. She never had to pull an all-nighter writing a paper and went to the gym at least four times a week. In the after, she was proud of herself for never collapsing under the weight of it, but it took its toll. She drank more, slept less, and exercised only when she had the energy, which was rarely. Her ability to concentrate was shot, which showed up in her grades. In the after, she was always among the first to finish midterms and final exams, leaving the test location with a third of the allotted time remaining—intent on getting it over with and hoping for the best. Her papers, started at the last minute, were usually written with the help of AI. She started considering her main academic talent to be covering her tracks well enough to avoid getting expelled for plagiarism.

She did better on the LSAT than she expected, given how little she had studied, but not well enough. This meant she had fallen off the path her brothers had managed to stay on—brothers she saw as cheap knockoffs of their father, possessing some of his ambition but little of his intellect, while capitalizing impressively on their proximity to power. There would be no elite law school in her future. No white-shoe law job or competitive clerkship.

Haley wasn’t sure why her mind had been hijacked in the after. It didn’t seem proportional to what happened during those few minutes. There was no lasting physical pain or nightmares. No insomnia. Seeing the person who attacked her around campus was tolerable; she looked through him, imagining she could vaporize him with her eyes. But her father’s example loomed over her. Without ending up damaged or deterred, he had suffered beatings by his stepfather for years, usually delivered on the slightest pretext. The worst had happened because he rested his damp head against the sofa upholstery while watching TV after swim practice. That time, he needed stitches and still bore a small scar on his forehead. He had told her this story during his lecture tour, his voice steady, as if it were just another childhood memory without particular significance. 

After graduation and being rejected from all the top-tier law schools she applied to, Haley went home to Virginia. The summer passed in a beery haze. Her mother mostly gave her the silent treatment, but her father went easier on her. Before he left for Italy to teach a course (he continued to travel a lot internationally in the summer, since he was hardly ever recognized in Europe, much less shouted down in the street; he blended in with the other well-to-do American tourists), he called her to his office to make a plan for her future. They decided he would arrange for a paralegal job at a DC law firm. She would work there for two years, then retake the LSAT. An Ivy League law school was probably out of reach, but there were other options. She could have a great career if she actually wanted to be a lawyer. She said yes automatically.

If the paralegal job hadn’t moved to the firm’s New York office at the last minute, Haley’s life might have stayed on the trajectory her father traced out. Instead, she was drawn into a new orbit of people who shared a disdain for ladder climbing. Jobs were transactional for them, and they worked as baristas and receptionists to support their real passions. Haley did a competent job at work, but the vivid part of her life happened at night. She went to art openings and saw live music, took the subway to far-flung enclaves of the city in search of interesting food, and joined a nonfiction book club.

Then she met the boy who would become her husband, mistaking him for a man because he was slightly older and had lines on his forehead and sprays of gray in his dark curls. He was dazzlingly brilliant but usually resisted the urge to correct people when he felt they were wrong. When they met, he was playing piano in a jazz quartet and composing music, while translating Russian texts into English to scrape by, though he could have done or been literally anything.

They married at City Hall after five months, and the part of her that was still religious, or at least superstitious, told herself to be grateful for what happened in college, since she would never have met this man or had this life if it hadn’t. Since she believed in what he was working on and was fiercely proud when the keys of his electric Yamaha flooded their apartment with bright sound, she told him to stop taking translation work so he could focus more intensely. She planned to eventually quit her paralegal job and apply to PhD programs in history, but she could wait.

Her parents, of course, disapproved: her mother, hysterically; her father, with a quiet gravity that once would have gutted her.

The unraveling happened so slowly it was imperceptible. She didn’t know it was underway when her husband became depressed after failing to get traction with agents and labels. She didn’t see it when her suggestion that he upgrade his website led to their first truly horrible fight, which ended with him smashing their coffee pot. She still didn’t see it when the horrible fights began happening monthly, then weekly, sparked by the tiniest disturbance in the environment.

And she definitely didn’t see it when, early in their marriage, she brought him home for Thanksgiving, and her father was polite but cool to him, as he would be to a stranger who approached him without an introduction. This was back when her husband still cared to make a good impression. Still drowning in love, she was grateful to him for putting his contempt for her father’s politics aside and complimenting his Scotch and trying to talk to him about golf—yet another random subject he knew something about, since he had caddied in high school. Learning this for the first time with a pleasant buzz from the wine, she thought of how lucky she was to be with such a richly textured person, and of all there was still to learn about him.

Two years later, after kissing a stranger during a weekend away with friends, she realized it wasn’t guilt in the proper sense she was feeling. She came home and told him she wanted a divorce. He fought it, breaking more things in the process, but not with real conviction.

With the help of a lawyer her father found, the marriage was wiped away as cleanly as a spill on oilcloth. She was grateful to him for saving the day, yet again, despite sensing an irrevocable shift in their relationship. His devotion to his new granddaughter—Rory’s first child—made her new place in the pecking order all the more obvious. In photos shared in the family group text, Haley saw him dote over the toddler with a tenderness she couldn’t recall from her own childhood. He was all goofy smiles, holding the girl’s hands over her head to help her shuffle across the floor, and getting down in the dirt to show her the creepy-crawlies under the garden pavers. 

But things were starting to happen for Haley. She found a garden apartment in distant Brooklyn and focused on her grad school applications with an intensity she hadn’t been able to marshal since early college. To her surprise, she got in almost everywhere she applied, including her top choice: a university in Boston with a renowned history program. (If being who she was—her father’s daughter, with a recognizable name and a statement of purpose that referenced her desire to study the history of American jurisprudence—had given her a leg up, she didn’t care. She had still worked her ass off on those applications.)

When she decided to move home to DC for a month before starting grad school, she imagined days spent reading and playing with her niece. It would be tinged with boredom, but short-lived and sweet. Instead, she found herself mostly alone. Her father decided to extend a week-long trip to Taiwan to almost a month, and her mother joined him. Haley ended up spending hours every day watching Netflix and going down the kinds of internet rabbit holes she had avoided for years.

When her parents eventually returned, Haley sensed she was overstaying her welcome. Her mother pretended to want to hear about the professors she planned to study with, but the strain of the effort was visible. Her father mostly sealed himself in his downstairs office after dinner, where he worked and played the first-person shooter game his clerk had introduced him to.

But on the night before she left, they made an effort. Her mother made a rack of lamb, her father bought a Whole Foods tiramisu, and Rory and his family came for dinner. Her father fawned over the little girl, then described the Taiwan trip in elaborate detail. As he rambled on, oblivious to the minutes ticking by without anyone else speaking, her mother rolled her eyes but wore her most affectionate expression. Only Rory’s polite Southern wife asked Haley about Boston, but that was enough acknowledgement at the time.

It was only the following day on the train, after she kissed them all goodbye, that the previous night started to grate on her. Specifically, what her father had said about her new university having a good law school, and that she should try to meet some of the students. Playing dumb, she had asked what he meant, while Rory snickered. “You’ve always had a taste for the finer things, honey,” her father had said patiently. “You’re not going to be able to afford them on a TA salary.”

She told herself it was nothing and to let it go—like water off a duck’s back, an expression her father overused. It was perfect for someone who believed he was impermeable.

As the train left Providence, she pulled out her phone and tapped out a long email to the law professor, whose email address, affiliated with the law school in Boston where she now taught, she knew by heart. She had kept tabs over the years—routinely but dispassionately, the same way she unsubscribed from promotional emails or deleted blurry photos from her phone. As the train was pulling into Boston, the professor replied that she was happy to meet the day after tomorrow on the Esplanade.

During any downtime she had over the next two days, between Target runs and orientation events, Haley opened her inbox to stare at the professor’s name. She didn’t need to look at the email itself, since she had memorized every word. It was terse but friendly, as if Haley were just a student scheduling office hours.

She came to the appointed spot near the bandshell ten minutes early, but the professor had gotten there first. She’d become lighter, thinner, which made her look more severe, and she was wearing a muted pair of gray slacks and a white button-down shirt; nothing eye-catching or extravagant. But she was still recognizably herself, even with her head tilted into a book.

“You’re early,” Haley said, her tone deliberately girlish to avoid sounding threatening.

The professor didn’t look up immediately. She clearly had known Haley was there and wanted to continue ignoring her for a moment longer. The only pop of color on her body was bright-red lipstick, which suited her well. She looked like the matriarch of a media empire, understatedly elegant but not shying from the awareness that people would look at her.

“I like to be early in situations that make me nervous,” she said, eyeing Haley up and down with undisguised wariness. “It makes me feel more in control, though that’s usually a mirage. Like now. Have a seat.”

Haley sat next to her on the bench, where they overlooked dozens of sunbathers splayed out on a grassy area in front of them. Just beyond, the river flowed like an inky blue ribbon, teeming with sailboats and kayaks. It occurred to Haley that this was a bad place to meet. They were both recognizable to anyone who had followed the news during the previous decade, and any one of these people could snap a photo while pretending to soak up the last drops of summer. But she understood that the professor had little idea of what to expect and was prioritizing safety by choosing a public place.

They were quiet for several seconds, both seemingly intent that the other should speak first. Haley recognized the childishness of this, given that she had implored the professor to be here, to help her clear up a few things now that she had come to understand her father in a different way, through the lens of a survivor, but she was too humiliated in the woman’s presence to speak.

The professor cleared her throat dramatically. “I can’t stay all day, Haley.” Her weary smile contained no trace of the smirk Haley had once been fixated on.

“Thanks for coming. I have to ask, why did you come? After that deranged voicemail I left you. Please tell me you have no idea what I’m talking about.”

“Oh, I heard it,” said the professor, drawing out the “oh.” “My assistant told me not to listen, but I’m a glutton for punishment. I eventually learned to stop listening to people who would call or write to tell me horrible things about myself, but I couldn’t get enough of it back then for some reason. You were in quite the state.”

“I regretted it as soon as I did it. I was convinced you were going to give it to the press.”

“That’s because your dad’s cronies always see conspiracies and evil plots.” The professor laughed bitterly, then looked at Haley with sudden warmth. “You were just a kid. You didn’t need to be brought into it.”

The professor picked her French-manicured nails while she waited for a reply of some kind. She caught Haley watching her and responded with a deep, guttural laugh.

“It’s a disgusting habit,” she said.

“Not at all! I’m sorry,” Haley said, though she did find it a bit disgusting.

“I wondered about you, even before that voicemail.” The professor’s eyes were a beautiful, tawny brown, like a big cat’s. It was easy to understand how someone could be led by this person. Television didn’t begin to capture her appeal. “To be his daughter. It couldn’t have been easy for you.”

“He was a great father actually,” Haley muttered.

“I don’t doubt it,” the professor said, still cradling Haley in her honey eyes. “But I knew him, and I can’t imagine he’s changed. He’s probably even more overpowering. Speaking from experience, being held in high esteem by someone like him was like opening a portal to another dimension, while it lasted. What happened wouldn’t have messed me up so badly if I hadn’t looked up to him so much. All I’m saying is it must be very hard for you to let him down.”

Haley nodded and stared at the river. She wished tears would come, if only to help bring this meeting to a conclusion. The professor might hug her, survivor to survivor, and they could go their separate ways with the satisfaction of having taken another step toward peace with their pasts. This was what she had hoped for, but she realized how stupid the idea had been. Clearly, she had read too many self-help books after her divorce. This woman would always be an enemy, no matter how luminous her eyes were.

They sat quietly until the silence was unbearable. The professor broke the stillness by reaching into her bag for her phone.

“I need to go. Are you sure there’s nothing else?” She sounded almost pleading.

“No, thank you,” Haley said, forcing herself to look at the woman again. She had been raised to be polite, after all.

“It’s not a straight road, but from your email, it sounds like you’re doing the work. I’m rooting for you.” The professor’s hand floated up for a few seconds in the proximity of Haley’s knee, as if she meant to touch it but couldn’t find the courage. She drew it back and pushed herself off the bench.

“I’m sorry for wasting your time.” Haley heard the voice she had once used in her legal job, polite but perfunctory. She tried to infuse a bit more feeling into it. “I’m truly grateful to you for coming.”

The professor hesitated with a baffled expression as if she wanted to have the last word, but thought better of it. She said goodbye and walked away.

▪

AN APPOINTMENT TO THE SUPREME COURT usually comes with the gift of unusual longevity, measured not only in lifespan but in healthy, productive years, but Haley’s father was the rare exception. He was a few days shy of his sixty-fourth birthday when cancer was found in his prostate. When he first told Haley about it during one of their sporadic calls, he sounded buoyant about his chances. It was in perfect keeping with his personality that he considered a cancer with a high survival rate to be barely worth mentioning.

He stayed unrelentingly positive through the barrage of radiation and hormone therapies and continued to work at a furious pace. His body got bigger and softer, but he claimed not to mind. He had never been vain about his appearance.

It was fortunate that he didn’t use social media or have a Google News alert set up for himself, because the public reaction was horrible, reaching a level of cruelty that may have penetrated the intricate scaffolding of disdain and indifference he’d built around himself. Haley subjected herself to the full blast of it from Seattle, where she was an assistant professor and married, with a brand-new baby. Cocooned in an armchair for hours each day as she nursed her boy, she found herself falling down rabbit holes on her phone again. She watched influencers who could only have been three or four when her father joined the Court celebrate his chemical castration and the karmic fittingness of such a punishment. Her hatred for them bubbled like lava inside of her, canceling out the surge of hormones from nursing that normally left her relaxed.

After a few days and sleepless nights of this, she and her husband agreed she would remove the social apps from her phone and find other, better ways to be a supportive daughter. So she started calling and texting him regularly for the first time in her adult life, and to her surprise, he always took her calls, and she was usually the one to hang up first. They spoke about each other’s work and the grind of working motherhood. (During every free minute when the baby napped, she was revising an article for an academic journal.) He seemed interested in all of it—down to the details of her son’s refusal to participate in tummy time and her decision to supplement breast milk with formula.

When the cancer metastasized to his bones, his doctors decided to try chemotherapy. The weight he had gained melted off, and then some, leaving him gaunt and in permanent need of a cane after fracturing his pelvis in one of the locations the cancer had spread to. Still confident that science and a retinue of Harvard MDs would save him, he wasn’t yet desperate enough to reach for miracle cures or fad diets, but that would happen in time. He would eventually eliminate all sugar from his diet, including his beloved mint chocolate chip, and start practicing mindful meditation.

He cut down on his workload, delegating more and more writing to his clerks, but never entertained the idea of stepping down. As far as Haley knew, no one suggested it to him either, not counting the op-eds in papers of record, which he didn’t take seriously. Toward the end, on one of their calls, he admitted he was operating at severely diminished capacity, as if this would be news to her. She pretended to be surprised. With real conviction, she told him that even a tenth of his talent, passion, and intellect were of value to the Court. As soon as they got off the phone, she realized how hypocritical this was coming from a person who complained about the laziness of senior tenured professors.

Then, without warning, he called to tell her he was going into hospice and would be resigning. His office in the basement, with its beautiful mahogany furniture and shelves full of leather-bound books, would be converted into a bedroom where doctors, nurses, therapists, and social workers could see him without invading her mother’s privacy. His working life was over, and he was throwing himself, with all his usual exactitude, into the task of dying well. Her brothers bickered so acrimoniously over who would get the roll-top desk with its secret compartments that her father had to adjudicate. He decided, with the bored neutrality he might have applied to discussions about an ugly, yet valuable vase, that it would be sold to an antique shop where it would fetch a good price.

On his good days, he read fiction prolifically, attempting to consume as many of the novels he had heard about over the years but never had time for as possible, and sketched. He turned out to be a talented portraitist, a surprise to everyone but himself. The walls of Haley’s apartment filled up with intricate pencil drawings of herself, her husband, their two-year-old, and even their goldendoodle—all drawn from photos she had sent. He had loved drawing as a boy but had given it up, which he regretted. “In retrospect,” he said with a self-deprecating laugh, “I should have played less golf.”

She went home to Virginia just in time, bringing his grandson and granddaughter (still in her womb). There was no more reading or drawing at that point, but the drugs he was on kept him sleepy and comfortable. His nurses described him as a model patient; even from the kitchen, Haley could hear him making them laugh. Another surprise he had saved for the end was that he could be funny, wielding a low-key gallows humor that provided relief from the constant tension for everyone but her mother, who seemed offended by his readiness to die.

Haley had been picking up takeout, eager for the opportunity for fresh air and some physical distance from her toddler, when he died. It happened suddenly, in his sleep, while her mother worked on her crossword in the chair beside him.

It was a relief to Haley, who had been dreading the spectacle of being in the room. She dropped the takeout bags on the carpet and held Casey as he sobbed. She cried, too, though it felt more like her body was mimicking his than producing tears of its own.

She read no obituaries and brushed off family members who suggested she be the one to talk to the press. They hinted that she—as his only daughter, and a professor, and a mother—was uniquely positioned to burnish his legacy. But she had no desire to try to make people think well of him. What mattered to Haley was that he had been her father, and a reasonably good one. She raided a box in the garage filled with treasures from his former office, taking his favorite fountain pen and a box of toy soldiers he’d gotten one long-ago Christmas in California, still his prize possession. Then she flew home to Seattle.

▪ ▪ ▪

Cotton O’Connell’s fiction has appeared in Southern Humanities Review and Fiction on the Web, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Colorado with her husband and two young children. In her free time, she enjoys cycling, reading, gardening, and playing the piano. She was previously a journalist for AdAge and other publications.

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