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“You know, Harry, you've been driving all day, and then you have just done all that wonderful dancing, all of which I really appreciated! I don't mind driving us back to Big Loft!”
Colonel H.F. Lee handed his wife-to-be-in-eleven-hours the key to the car, opened the driver's side door for her and made sure she was in comfortably, and then went around and gratefully settled into the passenger side.
To the radio for some music …some smooth jazz suited them both just fine.
But, Colonel Lee was jarred out of his pleasant half-sleep by a commercial twice as loud as the music he had been enjoying:
“Don't just get any personal injury lawyer! Get one from a firm willing to fight as hard for you as the accident crashed into your life! Get one that will take no nonsense from anybody trying to keep you from the resources you deserve so you and your family can recover! Call the Juggernaut Law Firm at (123) 456-7890 NOW! ”
Colonel Lee cracked up laughing.
“You know something about them?” his fiancee said.
“The firm offered me a job,” he said, “and I took the interview. It came from the fact that I joined the Judge Advocate General corps in the Army, mid-career, already at the rank of colonel – let's just say that doesn't happen often. They knew I had the makings of a really good lawyer just from how I was able to navigate that situation, and that I was willing to do just about anything to get results, because JAG doesn't really have colonels.”
“You took a demotion?”
“I served as captain under this proviso: a lot of cases were coming up involving men in Special Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and JAG had a gap in lawyers who intimately understood those kinds of situations. Cousin Ironwood and I filled the gap, provisionally – it just so happened that in the year JAG was working to fill that gap, the two of us had somehow both passed the bar!”
“Oh, it just so happened, huh?”
“You see why that law firm knew I could handle their kind of job?”
“Why didn't you take it?”
“Too much of the fun part of being at war, Maggie, to ever heal. I would have been wildly successful, as anyone unfortunate enough to face me in an interrogation room knows … but the Spirit of God warned me not to become a Juggernaut lawyer, but to pursue an humbler path: desk job in cold case for the Big Loft police force. I thought about that, 'Of course! Not even I could get in trouble there!' ”
His fiancee cracked up laughing.
“Well, that didn't work!”
“Ah, my love, but it did until July. I am alive today, and as healed as I am today, because I was able to have until July. And, in the midst of trouble in July and beyond, there you were.”