First to Break

Chapter Originals

Talia Ward slept with a man she met at a chambers party three days after she was called to the bar, and walked into Temple Gardens on the Monday to find him being introduced as the person she would be spending the next year fighting. Neither of them has mentioned it since. What they have done instead, for eleven months, is wage a small and extremely petty war — booked-out conference rooms, reassigned pupils, a chair lowered by exactly two inches every Tuesday. Then the Hallett brief comes into chambers, the biggest thing either of them will touch before they are forty, and the head of chambers puts both their names on it and tells them to decide between themselves who leads. Which is how Talia Ward ends up pulling Nathaniel Carr into a storage cupboard on the fourth floor and proposing terms: first to break takes second chair. He loses. He is not remotely upset about losing, which frightens her considerably more than winning did. And when the hearings start going badly, and he turns out to be the only person alive who has done this judge before, he names his price for the answer — half an hour, and she does what she is told.