Requests from bar associations.
Patricia teased him that retirement would be impossible because he did not understand the difference between being free and finding another document to read.
Sam usually denied this while reading another document.
That Saturday he pulled their dark blue Lexus into Westbrook Plaza shortly after three-thirty.
The sky was overcast.
A thin autumn wind moved wrappers across the parking lot.
Patricia unbuckled her seat belt.
“You coming in?”
“In five minutes.”
She looked at his phone.
“You’re working.”
“I’m reading.”
“That’s working when you’re a judge.”
“It’s one paragraph.”
“You said that forty minutes ago at breakfast.”
Sam smiled.
“Go buy groceries.”
Patricia opened the door.
“Milk.”
“On the list.”
“Coffee.”
“On the list.”
“Do not text me thirty seconds from now asking whether we need eggs.”
Sam looked at her.
“Do we need eggs?”
She stared at him.
Then shut the door.
He laughed as she walked toward the store.
Their marriage had lasted twenty-three years partly because Patricia had never been impressed by the title Justice Owens.
She had met him when he was still an appellate lawyer with more ambition than money.
At the time, Patricia was already an FBI agent.
She had worked organized crime, public corruption, kidnapping, and later crisis negotiation. Her career took her across the country and, on several assignments, outside it.
Sam used to joke that every interesting story at dinner belonged to her.
She always answered that judges had more interesting stories but were too boring to tell them properly.
After retiring from the Bureau, Patricia became an occasional consultant on criminal justice programs and appeared several times on a popular true-crime podcast. She never expected the appearances to produce a following, but people liked the combination of calm voice and investigative precision.
Over several years, her social media audience grew past a million.
She disliked being described as an influencer.
“I spent twenty-three years writing affidavits,” she once told Sam. “I am not dancing for an algorithm.”
Sam had laughed for ten minutes.