Doubt (Caroline Auden #1) - C. E. Tobisman Page 0,2

She knew the problem was almost always user error.

“Can I see it?” she asked, rising from her table. Even if she couldn’t stop the worries that circled her own mind like hungry crows, she could stop his.

The barista eyed her.

She knew what he saw. A petite woman with mahogany hair, messy despite her best efforts to tame it. But smart eyes, quick and alert. She didn’t fit the stereotype of a tech geek.

She could feel him judging.

After another moment’s hesitation, he moved aside.

“I’m dead if I can’t find those charges,” he muttered.

Caroline took stock of the interface. Unix platform. Antiquated point-of-sale software.

She glanced at the barista, who now stood beside the espresso machine, drying coffee mugs. He held the rag in his right hand. Okay, so he was right-handed. That meant he handled the register with his left hand while serving hot beverages with his right.

Scanning the left side of the register’s interface, Caroline noted the inventory keys.

“Did you recently restock?” she asked.

“Yes,” the barista answered.

Caroline’s fingers flew across the screen.

“It’s not supposed to look like that,” the barista said, his voice rising in alarm.

“I’m just isolating the recently modified records.” She changed the filter and hit “Enter.” “You must’ve hit the menu key when you were restocking. The charges got saved as an inventory file. It’s all fixed now. Everything’s back where it belongs.”

Caroline retreated to her table to gather her things. She’d stalled long enough. It was time to go.

As she shut down her laptop, she regarded her discolored leather bag. Passable in the tech world, it struck her as too coarse for the legal world. She’d have to get a new one when she got her first paycheck. Or not. Saving up to move out of her mom’s house was more important than a laptop bag without stains. Sanity first. Accessories later.

“I don’t know how you did that,” the barista called from the register, “but you saved my ass.”

“It was nothing.” Caroline shrugged. It was nice to be able to fix something. The tech emergency was far more fixable than the carnage she’d left at home. Her uncle snoring on the couch, still wearing last night’s clothes, reeking of Grey Goose and Drum. Her mom listening to that same damn Jason Mraz song on Spotify all day long until Caroline wanted to blow her brains out.

Before heading out the door, she’d tossed her uncle’s car keys in the bread drawer. That would keep him from driving until he was sober.

“Can I get you a cup of coffee?” the barista asked.

“I’m good with hot chocolate.” Caroline didn’t want to explain that coffee left her vibrating like a whirligig in a hurricane. With a natural disposition like a tuning fork, she was having a hard enough time keeping her mind steady.

“Next time, it’s on me,” the barista insisted. “You work around here?”

“I’m starting a new job today.” Caroline’s stomach torqued, even without the coffee.

“Let me guess—computers,” the barista said, grinning at her.

“No. Law.”

The barista’s eyebrows climbed up his forehead. “Really? Why not computers?” he asked. “You’re good with computers.”

Caroline stayed silent. It was a good question.

Caroline rested her head against the window of her new office. She exhaled a long breath, leaving a blurry white continent on the glass, moist and fleeting, dissolving around the edges. Her pulse throbbed in her ears, drowning out the sounds of lawyers and assistants and staff in the halls ramping up for another day’s work.

An hour earlier, she’d learned the document-management program. She’d enrolled in the firm’s health plan. She’d even given her address to the health club downstairs so she could start her week of free membership.

Now she waited for her career to begin.

When the office administrator left, he’d promised her that no one waited long for their first assignment. But the last hour had passed slowly in a Chinese water torture of worried moments, conjuring the same prickling agony Caroline had experienced before boarding her first roller coaster. Trepidation mixed with hope. Mostly trepidation.

She reached into her pocket for her worry beads. Her fingertips brushed empty fabric.

Damn. What a day to forget them.

It didn’t matter, she told herself. She deserved to be standing on the thirty-fifth floor of a skyscraper. Louis had chosen her. Of all the students the master litigator had taught in his clinical course at UCLA School of Law, he’d plucked her out of the lecture hall and offered her a job.

But Caroline couldn’t forget the statistics. The hiring trends. The attrition rates. The fact that only 15