My car died half an hour before the most important interview of my life. So I ran to it. Three and a half miles, in August, in Savannah, with the suit in a bag on my back.

I'm Joshua Pierson. Top of my class at UGA Law, which sounds impressive right up until you watch me lose an argument to a smoke detector. I have a brain that generates seventeen thoughts where one would do, a face that publishes my feelings on a rolling basis, and exactly one secret.

The secret is this. Nine years ago the ceiling of our apartment came down on my sister and she was under it for three hours. Then four years of a phone ringing in the wrong direction ? until a lawyer in Savannah named Richard Humphrey took a case very like ours all the way to the Supreme Court and won, and a door that had been painted shut came open.

So I didn't take this job. I took him. I have built my entire adult life toward a man who thinks he hired a kid who runs fast.

Richard Humphrey is thirty-seven, speaks about nine words an hour, and is funny in a way you only catch a beat after he's done it. He corrected the typo in my name with his own pen. He had a standing desk delivered before I got in, so I'd never have to explain why I can't sit still. He uses a cane after hours and would rather be caught doing almost anything else.

Here is the part I did not plan for. The man this entire city treats like a monument does not want to be handled carefully. What he wants ? quietly, and at a cost I'm only starting to understand ? is to hand somebody else the weight for one evening. And for reasons I cannot competence my way out of, that somebody appears to be me.

There is also a landlord hiding behind three shell companies, sixty-seven families with a mold problem and no lease worth the paper, a partner named Courtney Howard who has been keeping a binder, and my sister Emma, who has two volume settings and has never once located the dial in between.

I have forty-eight hours to tell him the truth before she does it for me. At a party. In front of the entire firm.

It's fine. It's going to be completely fine.

SAVANNAH LEGAL is a standalone LGBTQ+ workplace romantic comedy: age gap, slow burn, mutual pining, one catastrophic team-building retreat, and a grand gesture that takes the form of a nine-page firm policy with a conspicuous gap in it. Guaranteed happy ending.

Heat: one on-page love scene, sensual rather than explicit. Content notes: a workplace power imbalance, confronted on the page rather than waved away; chronic pain and a mobility disability; a serious childhood injury, referred to but never depicted.