Here’s an excerpt from the draft of the book I’m currently working on, The Genie:

Prologue

The man jolted awake, his dream of treasure slipping away like sand through an hourglass. He groaned, groping for the vibrating phone on his battered nightstand. The email he’d been waiting for had finally arrived.

The sender was the United States Supreme Court, and the message contained a link to the Court’s opinion in the final case of James Sheppard’s career.

Shep inhaled deeply. This was it—the last decision in his final fight as a street lawyer for the underdog. His heart pounded as he scrolled, the dense legal jargon blurring together until his eyes found the ruling.

He smiled grimly as he read.

Introduction

James, or Shep, as most called him, was named after his father’s favorite singer, James Brown, the Godfather of Soul. The nickname stuck in high school when his hometown paper ran the headline Sure Shot Shep after his last-second jumper won the state hoops championship his sophomore year. 

His hardwood glory days ended the following summer when he blew out his knee playing pickup ball. College coaches stopped calling, but he kept the nickname and the lean, rugged 6’4” frame that had made him a star.

With his hoop dreams shot, Shep hit the books and earned a full academic scholarship to his state’s flagship university. A taste for alcohol and partying nearly cost him that scholarship, but he sobered up, buckled down, and graduated in the top third of his class. 

College had never been a decision so much as an expectation—his parents had made that clear. You went, you got a degree, you found a job. So he went. He got the diploma but not a direction, walking away with a degree in general studies and no real sense of what came next.

What he did know was his purpose: to help people. Helping others had always come as instinctively to Shep as breathing. As a boy, he once spent an entire afternoon trudging through the snow, carrying a stranger’s groceries after spotting her struggling at a bus stop. He had been walking home from school, basketball under one arm, when he saw the elderly woman hunched against the wind and felt an impulse to stop and help. By the time they reached her apartment, his hands were red and numb, his homework long forgotten.

Later, when his mother asked why he was late, he simply said, “Someone needed help.”

She looked at him like he was from another planet. She never understood why her son always insisted on helping strangers. 

“Worry about yourself,” she’d tell him. “No one else will.”

His mother was a weary woman, sick and tired of being sick and tired. Though she held an accounting degree, a chronic kidney condition kept her from holding a steady job. She longed for a life filled with things much finer than what his dad, a jazz guitarist who lived gig to gig, could provide.

Fights over money were constant, but the one Shep always remembered happened when he was thirteen—the night his mother begged his father to give up music.

“It just doesn’t pay enough,” she pleaded.

Shep idolized his father, and the anguish in the man’s eyes left an indelible mark on his soul. His dad traded his guitar for a sales job, only to be downsized two years later. Months of unemployment pulled the family into a financial hole they never fully climbed out of. The defeat broke his father’s spirit. He never picked up his guitar again.

Years later, as Shep approached college graduation, he sat down with his father to discuss his future.

“I played it safe,” his father said when Shep asked about giving up music. He paused, then added, as if still trying to convince himself, “It was the right thing to do.”

“If Mom had supported your music, do you think you could’ve made it?”

His father hesitated. “We’ll never know.”

They sat in silence for a long moment. Shep didn’t have the heart to mention that playing it safe hadn’t worked out so great for his dad.

“I don’t want to play it safe,” Shep finally said. “I know I’m meant to help people, but I also want to travel and see the world.”

His father exhaled slowly. “Seeing the world won’t get you a job, son.”

“I’m not looking for a job. I want adventure. To meet people, go places.”

His father shook his head. “The world isn’t going anywhere. Build a career. Make money. Maybe help a few people along the way. Then go see the world.”

He explained that if he had focused on making money when he was a young man instead of chasing music, he might have had the freedom to pursue his dreams later in life.

Shep’s gut told him to chase his dreams. But he wanted to please his father, still his idol. So, he deferred his dreams to make money.

After all, his dad was right—the world wasn’t going anywhere.

He looked for a career where he could help people and make good money. Medicine required grades he didn’t have. Dentistry? He didn’t love teeth enough for that. Then, a favorite professor told him he had the sharp wit and vibrant presence of a great trial lawyer.

When Shep graduated into a brutal recession and a bleak job market, law school seemed like the logical next step.

He worked hard and did well, earning job offers from both a high-paying corporate megafirm in a big city and his hometown public defender’s office. He chose the megafirm and told himself it was because of its reputation as a trial lawyer’s boot camp.

Deep down, he knew it was about the money.

The money didn’t ease the ache in his conscience. Corporate law was a machine designed to protect corporate profits by grinding up the poor people caught in its gears. Shep’s soul chafed against the work. He had always been the kind to fight for the underdog, but now he was the bully—paid handsomely to crush the very people he felt an instinctive urge to protect.

At the firm, profitability wasn’t just a goal. It was doctrine. The partners trained the empathy out of Shep and taught him the dark arts of deny, defend, delay—a ruthless strategy designed to wear down vulnerable people until surrender was their only option.

Once, at a firm cocktail party, a senior partner—dripping in gold, from his gaudy wristwatch to the chunky chain around his neck to the slicked-back, gold-flecked toupee clinging to his scalp—laid bare the firm’s philosophy over a glass of whiskey.

“The weaker and poorer someone is, the more dangerous they are as an example,” he said, swirling his drink. “If the poors start standing up for themselves, others might ask, ‘Why not us?’ That’s the real threat.”

Shep’s eyes widened. “You can’t be serious.”

The partner merely shrugged, knocked back his whiskey, and strolled to the bar for a refill.

Shep lasted less than a year at the megafirm. 

His breaking point came when a partner handed him an eviction case targeting poor families in a crumbling apartment complex. A corporate slumlord was forcing them out to make way for high-rise condos. Instead of taking the assignment, Shep quit.

He moved home and maxed out his credit cards to start his own solo firm, driven by a need to fight for real people with real problems—especially those with problems caused by the corporations he once represented. It felt like penance for chasing money and crushing souls.

For over a decade, he fought the good fight against armies of corporate lawyers, ruthless and relentless as insects. The endless wars of attrition wore him down. He was exhausted. Burnt out.

Now, he was done lawyering.

The final straw was the case from this morning’s email, a wrongful death lawsuit against a corporate parking ramp.

The ramp’s security guard had gunned down his client’s teenage grandson in cold blood. The guard sat in prison on a plea deal, but the ramp’s insurance carrier refused to settle, dragging Shep and his grieving client, the boy’s legal guardian, through years of delays and legal mudslinging.

The week-long trial was predictably brutal.

The corporate lawyers painted Shep’s client, who could barely afford rent, as a schemer trying to profit off the death of a boy she had lovingly raised. They trashed the dead boy, too, twisting facts to suggest he was a thug, despite video evidence proving the guard was the aggressor.

Long before the verdict, Shep knew this trial would be his last. Something inside him snapped. Every instinct, every fiber of his being, screamed that his fight was over. On a limbic level, he knew he had to get out. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—lead another vulnerable human into trial against adversaries who lacked empathy.

In his closing argument, Shep told the jury that human life was priceless, but since they had to put a number on it, it should reflect the full measure of harms and losses.

“Under our civil justice system, money is the only form of justice available,” he said. “And justice should never come cheaply.”

The jury deliberated for two hours and returned a verdict of “infinity.”

As the courtroom emptied, the jury foreperson—a man with a twirly mustache, a gold stud in his ear, and a twinkle in his eye—pulled Shep aside. “Infinity’s the highest possible number,” he said, grinning. “The only amount that felt like real justice against a corporate bully.”

Shep hadn’t the heart to tell him the verdict left the door wide open for appeal.

The corporate side, as always, kept fighting.

Shep arranged for new lawyers to take over his remaining cases as the appeal on the infinity verdict dragged on. He told his clients that the toll on his health was too great. Most understood. The exhaustion in his deep voice and the dark circles framing his brown, almost-black eyes told them everything they needed to know: he was done.

Now, over two years after the trial, Shep lay in bed, reading the Supreme Court’s decision on the appeal.

It took his breath away.

In a 5-4 split, the Court upheld the jury’s verdict—but reduced the damages to one dollar.

Shep’s chest tightened as he closed his eyes and sank deeply into the pillows. The only career he’d ever known had ended with a knockout gut punch. The law had drained him dry, and he had left nothing to give.

Later, he would call his client to deliver the news. 

For now, he lay still and wished for peace.