I looked at my billable hours and groaned. As an undergraduate in law school, I had seen myself becoming a superhero, keeping my business cards tucked out of sight in the same manner that Clark Kent kept his big red 'S' hidden, and then whipping them out whenever someone needed saving. As an attorney, I was going to save the world. I don't think I even knew what billable hours were back then; didn't know how that kryptonite could haunt a man's dreams. Here I was, though, six years after passing the bar, and I found myself tiptoeing around the partners and hoping they weren't paying attention to anything other than the global numbers. Some Superman I was.

"Mr. Wellington wants to see you."

I stopped the timer on the billing software and removed my glasses to rub my eyes.

I didn't know it at the time, but the law firm had assigned me the best secretary in the building. I was new, part of that generation with no patience to learn dictation because we compose and type at the same time, and I was disappointed that Lois Lane hadn't been assigned to work for me. I suspect Mary was more disenchanted with the assignment than I was, based on the fact that I regularly heard her grumbling about "young attorneys who think they know everything." She could type faster than a speeding bullet, but I didn't have much use for that skill. The real gift I received was all of the history and rumors in the firm, going back the twenty-seven years to when Mary first started as an after-school filing assistant. By the end of my first week, I knew which committees would give me the best networking bang for my buck, which files were strictly off-limits, and every person to avoid, including Carter Wellington.

"Did you hear me?" Mary asked.

"Yes, Mary. I'm on my way."

Unsure what Wellington could want just before lunch, I looked around my desk and grabbed a pen and notepad. While our areas of law overlapped to some degree, he didn't often share work. Ever since becoming president of the firm, he strutted around the office wearing entitlement like it was one of his Italian silk suits. His daddy had been an associate of the elder John Maert and, when the Maert family attorney passed away, he convinced the patriarch to give his son a chance. Carter Wellington stepped right into a family fortune still worth millions, originally thanks to the lumber boom in the 1800s, and subsequently thanks to the paper industry that grew from it.

Wellington didn't practice corporate law, where he could have really made his fortune, but the Maerts kept his pockets greased just the same and, over time, he not only became the president of the firm, he grew into the firm bully, which was fascinating when you considered the practice group he worked in. Even first-year students were beginning to avoid estate planning. The word was out that Internet companies were popping up and offering flat fees for filing wills and trusts. Documents were pumped out through boilerplate merges following a quick and dirty interview done online. Wham, bam, here's your new family trust, and for an additional fifty bucks, here's a durable power of attorney. Not that a will or trust is the only thing an EP attorney manages. Of course not. There's also the dead people. And their petty, living relations who fight over every tarnished penny dug out from between the couch cushions. Wellington could have them. I'd rather fight crime.

I walked into Wellington's office, big enough to easily fit four of mine within its walls, and paused to see if he would join me at his conference table where we'd sit more as equals or if I'd be relegated to one of the pair of chairs facing his desk. He settled it when he made no move to get up from his desk, or even look my way. So, I wasn't there for idle chit-chat.

It reminded me of my interview.

"Green law for a green attorney," Wellington had joked when I introduced myself. I didn't find it funny at the time, and, six years later, I was still holding out that the joke would eventually be on him. Maert and Sons Paper was on the tail end of a multi-million dollar renovation due to Federal guidelines that had dictated pollution clean-up and were now facing new dictates for carbon compliance. And they weren't the only ones. Lots of companies were going to need experts just like me. Someday soon. I hoped.

"Muir," he said, tapping his annoying smirk with a red pen. I wasn't absolutely certain he knew my first name was Trevor.

"Wellington," I said. I couldn't tell you now, looking back, if it was his smirk or his eyes, but something hardened. I took a seat across from his desk and casually crossed my legs while my heart battered my ribcage.

His pen found a report sitting in front of him and drew a bright red circle, and I figured I knew what I had been called in for at that point. My heart didn't slow its frenetic pace, so it must have known too. Sure enough, when he spun the sheet around and slid it across the desk at me, I could see my billable hours.

"You're low. Again. That's four months straight."

I let my eyes find a knot in the grain of the desk. Anything to keep me from glaring at one of the several partners who had given me work, but then slashed my hours by half and, sometimes, three-quarters.

"You also haven't brought in any new clients over the last six months."

I waited, measuring the tone and weighing the words, unsure if I was being given the heave-ho, and too distrustful of the knot of anger in my throat to defend myself. I actually had a potential new client coming in this afternoon, but I didn't want to jinx it by throwing that info into the wind.

Wellington waited me out, and the silence turned into a chasm big enough for our building to drop into. The knot on the desk had started to pulsate, the rings shrinking and growing, and when Wellington cleared his throat, it took me a second to remember where I was.

"Well. You know where you stand, and you know what the firm's billable requirements are." He was tapping the red pen on his desk, but I still hadn't looked at him when I stood up and turned to leave. "You can take the report with you."

I reached back and slipped it off the desk, then crumpled it up as I walked back down the hall to my office and wondered for the eighteen millionth time if I had made the right choice. "I'm going to law school," I had told my dad the day I graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor's degree in biotechnology. He frowned, and I wondered right then if I had made a bad decision.

I had grown up hunting and camping with my family. My formative years were spent listening to my dad complain about the guys stripping turkeys out of our fields as fast as the DNR could release them, and for the longest time, I thought I was going to be a DNR agent to bring justice to the wrongs. But then, somewhere along the way, science happened. My father's rants had turned to the climate deniers. He swore they were embittered corporations trying to weasel their way into government positions in order to protect generations of their families' fortunes, and that was when I realized I had something worth protecting bigger than my own backyard. My dad wasn't exactly thrilled that I was, in his words, joining the bastions of bastards raping the little guys, but I saw the bigger picture of helping organizations develop plans for compliance, and I knew Environmental Law was a good match.

At the time of my graduation, in this small city where I hailed, environmental law attorneys were still prosecuting hunters for taking too many deer, defending pipes filled with lead, and monitoring pollutants, but I wanted something more eco-friendly. I wanted to help companies with environmental quality control compliance, and I followed every soundbite related to EPA proposals and regulations. I could walk the walk and talk the talk, and my firm must have seen the need to have environment-friendly counsel on board because they hired me knowing my undergrad was biotechnology. At least that's what I told myself as I spent six years avoiding the bankruptcy work I was first stuck on and weaseling my way into any matter remotely related to environmental anything that ended up at the county courthouse. I worked on everything from property zoning to hunting violations. Truthfully, I was happy with anything that put me outdoors, and that was precisely why I was sitting at my desk, staring out my window at a parking lot, and moping when Mary buzzed me for the second time that day.

"Dave Sinclair is here."

"Who's–"

"Fast-talking lake guy?" Mary sighed with exasperation. "It's on your calendar. Conference Room B."

"Oh, right! The new–" I didn't say it. No way was I going to tempt fate.

I looked at my watch. He was early, and it gave me a couple of extra minutes to review the memo I had written as follow-up to our initial phone call.

Dave Sinclair and his neighbors lived on a channel at Lake Henry. The wetlands across the channel, which had been swampy reeds barely able to support scrub twenty years ago, had morphed with the annual cycles of growth and decay, and the muck had solidified into an island. In addition to the obstruction of their view from the trees that were now spouting, the level of silt in the channel had risen, and their boats were getting stuck.

I placed the memo into a portfolio and headed to the conference room, all at once excited to be working on a matter that actually fell in the purview of environmental law, and secretly giving Wellington the middle finger.

Sinclair was somewhere in his mid-twenties, and I wondered what he did for a living that afforded him property on the lake. He had that air of confidence that good-looking guys have; a swagger of self-importance in the way he walked and shook my hand; and a smile that felt more like disdain, but above it, eyes that danced with the light of practical jokes. He was talking before we even reached a conference room. Mary had called him fast-talking, but that didn't really cover it.

"It's been a nightmare. I mean, seriously, a nightmare. We found out our properties all got crap in them. You know, under the ground. Thanks to all those years they weren't on the septic system. I know! Gross, right? But listen, we want to stay focused on what matters most, am I right? I'm talking girls in bikinis driving boats and sinking anchors on the sandbar. They do these dance parties out there, but we can't even see them anymore without binoculars because everything is so overgrown now. Not that I'm just sitting there with binoculars. That'd just be weird. I mean everyone on the lake takes their boat out to the sandbar, right? And barbeques! Say, I'm having a barbeque for July 4th. You should come! It's the best party in the county. You'll come, right? I can put you down?"

I had opened and closed my mouth several times throughout his beach party soliloquy and had finally given up, thinking I would never get a word in edgewise. It took me a moment to realize he had invited me to a barbeque and had even paused to let me answer.

"How'd you get my name?" I asked.

"Miggy Mendez mentioned you might be able to help me out."

"Miggy? Oh! Mike?" Disappointment is ruthless. It comes out of nowhere to punch you right in the gut. I had worked with Mike before. He had cut half of my billable hours when I assisted in representing a concrete subcontractor who had poured cement according to the general contractor's specs, but then a sinkhole caused the medium to bend and crack. I wondered if I could set up the lake residents as a new client and avoid giving Mike origination. "So you're a client already, then?"

"Nope. Friends with his son forever. Had them out to the lake for Memorial Day. I was telling him about our situation. You know, dropping hints really. Hoping he'd offer to help me out, but he said it's not his specialty or some nonsense, because, hey, if you're a lawyer, don't you do lawyering in everything? Anyway, he dropped your name, and I looked you up."

I made a mental note to thank Mike. Maybe I'd even buy him half a bottle of wine.

"I think Mary already talked with you about my hourly rate?"

"Yeah. About that. Seems pretty steep when we could do all this work ourselves. You know the forms are online, right? Yeah, it's just a matter of finding them. I mean it's just time-consuming. So, how hourly are we thinking? Many hours you think? We're all going to split the cost, but still, if–"

I had to interrupt before he got lost or just plain changed his mind and walked out. "I need to know a little more about what you need. On the phone, you mentioned you had core samples done. Did you get a copy of the results?"

Sinclair opened an envelope and passed me a report. "I didn't realize how much work all of this was going to be, you know? The lake association told me I had to get a permit to do the work, so I went down to the State Department building to do that, and this little guy came out from his hole in the wall and started spouting off about how we can't move the silt and all the lakes are polluted. I think he's just jealous. Doesn't get to live on the lake with his wages, right? Anyway, turns out he was right, which sucks, but when we found out we couldn't move the silt, we thought, no big deal. We'll just throw the muck up on the island because if we're contaminated, so is the island, right? But no can do. They say it's wetlands."

"Who's they?" I felt like I was in a wrestling match, having to wait at the edge of the circle until my opponent had ducked and dodged and finally stutter-stepped himself out of breath.

He frowned and scratched his head.

"Well, I don't really know. It came up at one of our meetings. Let me think a second. Yeah, I guess 'they' are the people who live on the lake. Someone said marshes are all protected."

"Well, not all marshes are protected wetlands. At least not here in our state. I can check on Lake Henry." I scribbled a note to check the DEQ land conservation records.

"Anyway, we thought we could bring in a big muck truck–you like that? A muck truck. We thought we could bring in a big truck and haul all the silt away, but nope. Can't move contaminated soils."

"That's true," I said, absently. I flipped through the pages and read a summary of the chemical and mineral compounds while Sinclair talked about his meeting with the residents. There was a fair amount of arsenic, and I wondered if there had been an orchard nearby.

"...so, long story short, we all got raw sewage on our property."

I'd missed his story, but got enough of it to know that the residents thought the issue was the number of years people had lived on the lake without being connected to the county septic system. Waste had flowed freely into the lake.

"I'm not sure that's the issue. Human waste typically gets broken down by bacteria when it's in soil. The bigger concern, at least by the EPA or DEQ, is the heavy metals. See here?" I slid the report over and pointed at a single line in the elements table. "That's arsenic. Probably from pesticides, or maybe treated lumber. Or both. And this–" I pointed to another line "–is showing that it's locked in clay. So, you start digging around, and you set a known carcinogen-free. You can probably see how the DEQ might not want you moving that material."

"Well, what are we supposed to do?"

"That's a very good question. I suspect it means removing the contaminated soil so that it can be treated."

"Well, that's what we're trying to do," Sinclair said with exasperation.

"Seems like it. We're just going to have to figure out the best way to do it. Let me think about this a little bit and draw up a proposal with an estimate on the number of hours I'll need. Who did your core samples?"

"Tri-County ECS."

"Oh, that's fantastic! I've worked with Jay Hegle. He's a great guy. Let me give him a call and see what he thinks."

I showed Sinclair to the door. Inside, I was doing a happy dance. My own client! Origination! And even in my practice area.