Custody
Authors: Nancy Thayer
Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Sagas, #Romance, #General, #Itzy, #Kickass.so
Custody
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2014 Ballantine Books eBook Edition
Copyright © 2001 by Itzy, Kickass.so
Introduction copyright © 2014 by Nancy Thayer
Excerpt from
Nantucket Sisters
by Nancy Thayer copyright © 2014 by Nancy Thayer
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
B
ALLANTINE
and the H
OUSE
colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Originally published in hardcover by St. Martin’s Press in 2001.
eBook ISBN 978-0-553-39100-8
Author photograph copyright © Jessica Hills Photography
Cover design: Eileen Carey
Cover image: © Julia Davila-Lampe/Moment Open /Getty Images
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book
Nantucket Sisters
by Nancy Thayer. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
v3.1
Contents
An Introduction from the Author
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
An Introduction from the Author
What does it mean to be a family? What would a woman surrender to achieve her deepest desire—whether that desire is personal or professional? Medical achievements, legal limitations, and our deepest human longings and emotions collide in my novel
Custody
, during the fight for custody of a teenage girl. Anne Madison, a respected state politician and mother, and her estranged husband, prominent physician Randall Madison, must have the fate of their daughter, Tessa, decided by Kelly MacLeod, a family court judge with a profound secret of her own. This book is has all sorts of families.
I will always be grateful for the help of the many professionals who deal daily with complex situations like child custody: probate and family court judges, clinical social workers, and those who support the court and psychological welfare workers. How does anyone balance public service with a rich family life? I think that takes the wisdom of Solomon … and the vigor of the Energizer Bunny!
I’m delighted that my early novels are being made available to my readers as ebooks. My style has changed slightly, as the world has grown faster, but my subject, family life, remains as mysterious and fascinating to me now as it was in these early books: falling in love, raising children, friendships and betrayals and forgiveness.
I hope you enjoy these early novels and discover some new friends there.
Nancy Thayer
Custody: n.
1. a guarding or keeping safe; care; protection; guardianship
2. detention; imprisonment
Webster’s New World Dictionary, College Edition, 1968
Prologue
September 5, 2000
S
OME DAYS
, K
ELLY THOUGHT
,
ARE
more important than others. Some days you wake with your heart pounding and your hopes higher than the sky. Some days you know you are exactly where you are meant to be.
Today, the first Tuesday in September, Kelly drove, in the early morning sunshine, down Cambridge Street, feeling like a well-read traveler entering a foreign country for the first time.
This was a day she would remember all her life. This was the day she began the work she had dreamed of, sacrificed for, and worked toward steadily and without rest for thirteen years.
During the past month she had become slightly accustomed to wearing the black robe and accepting the deferential greeting of “Judge.” But for the past month she had been sitting on cases with other judges, moving through various courtrooms in the Commonwealth, as she went through the standard month of training that all Massachusetts Probate and Family Court judges receive before they sit alone.
Today she would sit alone. Leaving the heavy traffic, she turned off onto Thorndike Street, entered a lot, and parked her silver Subaru in a space reserved with her name. She stepped out of her car, clicked it locked, and looked up at the stately back of the century-old, four-story, redbrick courthouse.
Here she would render justice. Here she would listen to, evaluate, and then—using all her wisdom, knowledge, logic, and fierce intellectual skill—decide, entirely by herself, the fates of the people who stood before her.
She was only thirty-five years old, but she was competent. She was ready. She knew, better than anyone else, how hard she had worked for this.
With her own key, she let herself in through the back entrance of the courthouse. Inside, she nodded at the security guard as she shouldered through the throngs crowding the central lobby and side halls. So early in the morning, the noise of whispers and coughs, shoes clicking across corridors, briefcases snapping shut swirled up through the balconied floors toward the blue and gold dome. Too impatient for the ancient elevator, Kelly hurried up the smooth, wide steps, their marble worn into silky troughs. The crowded hallways buzzed with whispered consultations, arguments, greetings and laughter, filling her with a calm exultation as she hurried to her chambers.
Her
chambers!
Printed in gold on the glass door were the words:
JUDGE KELLY MACLEOD
PRIVATE
DO NOT ENTER
With a shiver of anticipation and a blissful sense of entitlement, she opened the door. She entered.
“Good morning, Judge.” Her secretary, an Asian woman in a plaid suit, was already at her desk, up to her elbows in cases and folders.
“Good morning, Luanne.”
“Good morning, Judge.”
Kelly smiled at the court officer, a tall, bald, stately African-American, in his navy blue uniform. “Good morning, Ed.”
“Good morning, Judge.” Dignified in her beige silk suit and pearls, Sally Beale, Kelly’s clerk, was the key to a smooth transition into this court. Sally had been here for a dozen years. Sally knew everything.
“Great suit,” Kelly told her.
“Thank you, Judge.” She was reserved, treating Kelly with respect, and Kelly was grateful. Sally had known Kelly as a law student, a fledgling lawyer, a pro bono activist, and a judicial applicant. If anyone had an idea of how far Kelly had come, it was Sally.
“What have we got today?” Kelly asked, looking toward the door to the courtroom. That door was all that stood between this place of quiet and the storm of human lives.
Sally handed her the trial list. “First, a quick and easy divorce. Then a child custody case. That won’t be short, and it won’t be sweet.”
“Then we’d better begin.”
“Right. See you out there.” Sally slid through the door into the churning whispers of the courtroom.
Kelly took her black robe off the hanger, pulled it on over her gray pantsuit, adjusted the shoulders and collar. Some of the older women judges wore beautiful scarves at the neckline, but Kelly wanted to keep her image severe for now. Quickly she scanned her reflection in the mirror hanging on the closet door. She’d subdued her blond hair in a twist at the back of her head, and not a hair had dared escape. Fine. She looked fine. No reason to hesitate. She nodded to Officer Harris.
He asked, “Ready, Judge?”
“Ready.”
He opened the door.
Kelly walked into the courtroom.
Her
courtroom.
She’d been in this room before, many times, as a lawyer representing one side or another in a divorce or child custody case. The enormous room was brightened by many windows, its walls painted a peaceful pale blue trimmed with cream. The ceilings were perhaps twenty feet high. The wood of the railings, witness stand, conference tables, clerk’s and judge’s bar, officer of the court’s station, was golden oak, darkened by the years, glowing with the patina from the touch of generations of petitioners, lawyers, registrars, and judges.
It was a lovely room.
Behind her, his voice rich and solemn, Officer Harris announced, “Hear ye, Hear ye, Hear ye. Court, all rise. The Middlesex Probate and Family Court is now in session, the Honorable Judge Kelly MacLeod presiding. God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”
The Honorable Judge Kelly MacLeod settled in her chair behind the high bench, her black robe resting at her ankles. She nodded good morning to the court stenographer, then looked out, with confidence, at the courtroom.
She saw, as she knew she would, clusters of people seated in the gallery. She saw a couple, well-dressed, elegant, and miserable, sulking next to their attorneys at the lawyers’ table. Their divorce. Her first case.
Beyond the railing, she saw a lovely, slender, blond woman, the female plaintiff in the child custody case, with her lawyer.
She saw another lawyer speaking to the male defendant in the child custody case.
And she saw, with a terrible thrill, that this was the man whom, over the past few months, she had secretly known, secretly met, and secretly come, desperately, to love.
One
August 3, 2000
A
T FOUR O
’
CLOCK ON THE
first Thursday in August, a small, elite group gathered in the waiting room of the Governor’s executive suite in the gold-domed State House in Boston, Massachusetts. Some of the most powerful and respected officials in the Commonwealth were there: the Governor, the Chief Justice of the Probate and Family Court Department, three judges, and several attorneys.
They were all there because of Kelly MacLeod.
This afternoon she would be administered the oath of office as Associate Justice of the Middlesex County Probate and Family Court.
At thirty-five, Kelly MacLeod was the youngest woman ever to become a Massachusetts judge.
And at this moment, she certainly felt young.
From the far end of the hall came the hum and rustle of nearly eight hundred people gathering for the ceremony in the state legislative chambers. Kelly’s mouth was dry. Her knees were weak. Her mind was blank.
Her fiancé, Jason, strode toward her through the crowded room. The scion of a wealthy Boston family, the son of a lawyer, a lawyer himself, Jason drew admiring looks as he passed. Now he put his hands on Kelly’s shoulders in a steadying way and said, “You look beautiful.”
Dutifully she replied, “Thank you.” The truth was, she didn’t want to look
beautiful
, whatever that meant. She wanted to look intelligent and dignified, and perhaps—she was six feet tall, she could achieve this—
imposing
.
She’d better settle for beautiful. She’d better settle for
conscious
. Here she stood, about to realize her life’s grandest dream, and she thought she might faint. Her lungs seemed paralyzed. She put one hand on her chest. Her throat was closing. She was drowning in the air.
“I’m going out to join Mother,” Jason told Kelly.
She nodded.