Excerpt from Take It Back by Kia Abdullah, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She picked up the menu, the soft black leather warm and springy on her fingertips. "Yes, we shall."

Safran's presence was like a balm. His easy success and keen self-awareness was unique among the lawyers she had known—including herself. Like others in the field, she had succumbed to a collective hubris, a self-righteous belief that they were genuinely changing the world. You could hear it dripping from the tones of overstuffed barristers, making demands on embassy doorsteps, barking rhetoric at political figureheads.

Zara's career at the bar made her feel important, somehow more valid. After a while, the armor and arrogance became part of her personality. The transformation was indiscernible. She woke one day and realized she'd become the person she used to hate—and she had no idea how it had happened. Safran wasn't like that. He used the acronyms and in-jokes and wore his pinstripes and brogues, but he knew it was all for show. He did the devil's work but somehow retained his soul. At thirty-five, he was five years older than Zara and had helped her navigate the brutal competitiveness of London chambers. He, more than anyone, was struck by her departure twelve months earlier. It was easy now to pretend that she had caved under pressure. She wouldn't be the first to succumb to the challenges of chambers: the grueling hours, the relentless pace, the ruthless colleagues, and the constant need to cajole, ingratiate, push, and persuade. In truth, she had thrived under pressure. It was only when it ceased that work lost its color. Numbed by the loss of her father and their estrangement before it, Zara had simply lost interest. Her wins had lost the glee of victory, her losses fast forgotten. Perhaps, she decided, if she worked more closely with vulnerable women, she would feel like herself again. She couldn't admit this though, not even to Safran who watched her now in the late June twilight, shifting in her seat, hands restless in her lap.

He leaned forward, elbows on the table. "Jokes aside, how are you getting on there?"

Zara measured her words before speaking. "It's everything I thought it would be."

He took a sip of his drink. "I won't ask if that's good or bad. What are you working on?"

She grimaced. "I've got this local girl, a teenager, pregnant by her mother's boyfriend. He's a thug through and through. I'm trying to get her out of there."

Safran swirled his glass on the table, making the ice cubes clink. "It sounds very noble. Are you happy?"

She scoffed. "Are you?"

He paused momentarily. "I think I'm getting there, yeah."

She narrowed her eyes in doubt. "Smart people are never happy. Their expectations are too high."

"Then you must be the unhappiest of us all." Their eyes locked for a moment. Without elaborating, he changed the subject. "So, I have a new one for you."

She groaned.

"What do you have if three lawyers are buried up to their necks in cement?"

"I don't know. What do I have?"

"Not enough cement."

She shook her head, a smile curling at the corners of her lips.

"Ah, they're getting better!" he said.

"No. I just haven't heard one in a while."

Safran laughed and raised his drink. "Here's to you, Zar—boldly going where no high-flying, sane lawyer has ever gone before."

She raised her glass, threw back her head and drank.

* * *

Artemis House on Whitechapel Road was cramped but comfortable and the streets outside echoed with charm. There were no anodyne courtyards teeming with suits, no sand-blasted buildings that gleamed on high. The trust-fund kids in the modern block round the corner were long scared off by the social housing quota. East London was, Zara wryly noted, as multicultural and insular as ever.

Her office was on the fourth floor of a boxy gray building with stark pebbledash walls and seven stories of uniformly grimy windows. Her fiberboard desk with its oak veneer sat in exactly the wrong spot to catch a breeze in the summer and any heat in the winter. She had tried to move it once but found she could no longer open her office door.

Excerpted from Take It Back by Kia Abdullah. Copyright © 2020 by Kia Abdullah. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.