Terry, this was stellar. The way you revealed Ron's not-quite-platonic feelings for Lois and how the word "friend" was a sucker-punch to his psyche — ack, it was painful to read!
I loved Connie's take-no-prisoners interrogation, but, like Maria, I'm wondering if she didn't have a similar experience in the courtroom that ended not so happily ever after, and that's why she stopped taking defense cases?
And this brought tears to my eyes:
“Some philosopher once said that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. You getting stronger?”
She tried to smile at him. “I’ll live.”
He sighed and crossed his arms heroically. “Not sure I will.”
Wow. Just ... wow. There's no way to adequately convey just how much this passage affected me, and how well you've encompassed Lois and Clark's respective emotional states in just a few well-chosen lines.
Brilliant work, Terry. I'm looking forward to the next part!
