Be adult, do miracles.

Nika wondered if miracle worker was a skill she could add to her busy Linkedin profile.

She stared calmly at her latest client, and asked "So you admitted to being intoxicated while driving?"

The mother of three, and wife of a very rich hockey player, fiddled with one of the vintage figurines on Nika's desk. "Well, no. I mean, I guess." The woman sighed. "So, is there any way for it to totally, totally disappear?"

Nika consulted the rap sheet in front of her. Blood alcohol twice the legal limit, speeding in a school zone, admitting to alcohol abuse, and resisting arrest. Then she glanced up at the anxious-looking, well dressed woman in front of her. "We'll do our best."

But clients didn't want that, so Nika spent a further ten minutes cajoling the woman into leaving her office. There was a fine line between comforting a client and over-promising.

Once it was finally over, Nika slumped into her expensive, ergonomic chair. The lumbar support was sympathetic, but ultimately knew nothing of the weight on her shoulders.

Clients wanted miracles. They wanted, even if they denied it, for everything to go away cleanly, quickly, and perfectly. They didn't want to be scolded, or told realities, or have to wait even a second before wiping their hands of a problem.

Nika's boss wanted miracles. Nothing illegal, as he often reiterated at meetings, glancing around at some fresh-faced recruit. But he wanted intricacies of the law dissected, rearranged, bullied, cajoled, and emotionally blackmailed into becoming 'not guilty' verdicts for clients. He wanted to hire fewer paralegals, spend less money, and expected them to work weekends, holidays, anniversaries and funerals.

Nika's ex-girlfriend had wanted a miracle too. Specifically, the miracle of manufacturing time. In the beginning, it had been sort of romantic when they'd both spent every spare second together, laughing about their untenable workloads and dreaming about a different future. Then Somaya went and got some relaxed entrepreneurial gig as the IT head of an exotic weed dispensary and wanted Nika around more.

Nika scrunched her eyes closed and dragged her acrylic nails gently across her face. She never got used to those corporate mandated claws. They looked rich, put together, and nicely hid away her chewed down nails.

But they were hellish to type with.

The calendar was covered in red notes, from a secretary who left last week on paternity leave.

The one note in blue said, Call Mom.

Nika glared at it, feeling a familiar mix of guilt and annoyance.

The biggest ask obviously came from her parents. They wanted her to single-handedly lift the family out of poverty, send money back home to some random, unknown family members. They wanted her to somehow force her older sister, who was homeless and jobless, to transform into an impressive, useful member of society.

Nika snorted bitterly. Nobody could make her daydreamer of a sister snap out of it.

There was a knock on the door, and Nika straightened immediately, typing nonsense onto her computer as her supervisor entered.

"Hey!" Brian sang as he entered the room, grinning at her. "Excellent work on the Sanger-Schmidt merger last week. You, are a legal rockstar." He was doing that weird guy thing where they over-complimented women.

Nika still couldn't decide why. "Thanks. It's what we do." Kevin next door had also killed it in a merger last month, so she wondered if Brian had recently attended some minority empowerment seminar or something.

Brian smiled anyways, staying the respectful post Me Too distance. "I going to attend the Pride event downtown this weekend."

Nika felt her fingers falter on the keyboard. "Okay?"

"Will I see you there?" Brian's tone suggested that he expected to be appropriately patted on the back for his progressive allyship.

Nika buried an eye roll and/or a laugh. "Probably not, I'm kind of busy this weekend. Have fun though." Then she politely returned to the screen, watching her Ivy League-intelligent, but emotional high school dropout boss leave.

He probably now thought she was some kind of self-hating lesbian, or some buzzkill feminist. Whatever.

Speaking of being busy this weekend, she'd promised to give a speech at the LGBTQIA centre downtown on how laws affected trans youth.

Nika rubbed her temples and reached for the coffee cup. It was empty.

She almost yelled for secretary, before remembering that he was gone.

Probably for the best, she should drink less coffee anways.

Rather than dwell on that, Nika got to work on drafting some legal actions and plotting out explanations or pleas for her new client. At least with the job, the answers were somewhere. Or it was impossible. Nika rarely felt helpless or hopeless, or sad.

She made some calls, to the police station and then to her client's doctor. After a few explanations and promises to pay a fine, the charges got dropped.

Then she switched over to the corproate buyout contracts she was supposed to be vetting.

Without her permission, her eyes drifted to the framed picture on her desk. It was her sister and her, grinning in front of a stunning mountain range. Back when her sister had a hypothetical future, and when her family had yet to explode.

The picture got angled away from her, or she'd just get furious remembering the last failed attempt she'd made to get her sister to return to reality. The one where her sister acted like Nika was the crazy one with a job, place to live, and purpose.

There was a knock on the door, and Nika carefully stifled an angry sigh. The last thing she needed was to get emotional in front of Brian.

"Yes?" Nika asked, when the door did not open.

Lavania stuck her head in sheepishly and now Nika really had to stifle a sigh.

Another miracle asker.

"Everything okay?" Nika asked, and Lavania shuffled into the room, looking awkward as hell.

"So, I'm a little confused." Lavania started predictably, and Nika just stared at her expressionlessly as their intern launched into a retelling of all the problems.

"So," Lavania said her favourite word again. "Do you have any advice?"

If Nika was in the mood to really impart some Wisdom, she'd start by telling Lavania to just work hard. The girl showed up every day, with some question on how to do the job she never did.

Lavania overthought simple problems, absolutely cracked under pressure, and had admitted once that she only did law because of a legal drama she watched 9 seasons of.

Normally, Nika stayed as far away as she could from the underlings, but Brian's boss, had made her Lavania's mentor.

More like babysitter, Nika reflected tiredly, only half listening as Lavania listed further issues that anybody with three brain cells could figure out.

Nika wasn't a people person, but she'd lied about her love of teamwork in an interview, and was now stuck with Lavania. And Eric, the last intern, and then Dani, the intern before that intern.

"Okay, let's stop there." Nika cut Lavania off. "What you need to do, firstly, is go to the law library on the third floor." Lavania started writing notes, and Nika had the strange urge to tear it up.

Lavania had been writing notes for over four months, but Nika had yet to see any productive outcome of the meticulous and minute details Lavania wrote down.

"Then, talk to Jean-"

"Jean can help write this?" Lavania asked, in her stupidly innocent way, and Nika gritted her teeth.

"No, Jean can help you find research that helps you write it." Nika blinked tiredly. Wearily. Law school had been fun, a drunken rollercoaster of terror, adrenaline, and bad decisions. Lots of pretty, clever girls too.

Then clerkships and internships had been a taste of reality, in the early days before her family's nonsense spilled everywhere, and when all she had to do was be impressive.

Now she'd been impressive for years, and she was getting tired of meeting people uninterested in working as hard as she had.

"Lavania, I need you to just relax. Plenty of idiots get this done, and you're not an idiot." Nika consoled automatically, once she was finished explaining. "You understand everything?"

The intern nodded, eyes bright with unshed tears, then she got up and left.

The work wasn't as time consuming today. Most of being a lawyer was a perpetual game of catch up with deadlines, trial dates, and arraignments. Nika was finally a little free, for about an hour.

She picked up the phone and dialled her stupid sister. "Can you tell her to call me back?" She asked her sister's current couch provider.

"Hmm." Fianna or Fiona replied, and then hung up.

Nika rolled her eyes, and cracked open one of the files on her desk.

It was a request to help a client sue their old company for harassment. Nika started annotating the file, figuring out what kind of arguments, precedents, strategies and jury would be best suited.

Her eyes were getting heavy, a combination of caffeine withdrawal and lack of sleep weighing on them.

But she was a machine, she was an unstoppable, unicorn of the legal field. So special that she could change the course of human lives, change the law (once or twice), change the minds of some stuck bosses on whether or not to hire her.

So why didn't it all work out? Why was it a Sisyphean list of miracles?

There was a message from her mom that cropped up in her messages. I need your help, it said, and Nika sighed.

Why was she the only one never in a position to ask for help? There was no safety net, no girlfriend or wife, literally no one to help her out.

But... she could cry about her shitty life in her bathtub Sunday night. These thoughts never helped.

Nika typed back immediately. Work ends at 9, will call you then.

Love you. Her mom replied.

Nika stared at it. A job review, for a job of miracles well done.

Her phone rang and Nika picked it up.

"Hey, Niks." Her sister's ever-smiling, ever unconcerned voice said. "What's up? You gonna try and fix me again?"

Despite her sister's laziness, her abandonment, Nika had to smile at that calm, happy tone. "It's my job, isn't it?"