Opposing Counsel (Paperback)

Grant Eriksen is a family law attorney in Houston with a clean record, a snake plant, and a life so quiet it echoes. Niesha Cole is a respiratory therapist and single mother of two who walks into his office with a color-coded binder, a custody case, and the kind of composure that comes from years of holding everything together alone.
Her ex-husband is filing for expanded custody - not because he wants more time with their children, but because he wants to stop paying support. Grant takes the case. He wins the case. And somewhere between the courtroom and the ruling, between late-night phone calls that last too long and silences that say too much, the line between attorney and client disappears.
What follows is not a fairy tale.
It is the story of two people falling in love across the oldest line in America - a white man and a Black woman navigating the weight of a world that has opinions about who they are together. A world of stares in restaurants, polite discomfort at family dinners, and the quiet, grinding accumulation of moments that are too small to name and too heavy to carry. A world where love is real and still not enough.
Set against the sprawl and humidity of Houston, Texas, Opposing Counsel is a novel about custody and code-switching, about binders and boundaries, about the difference between being needed and being loved. It is about a man who learns to see and a woman who is tired of teaching. About children who understand more than their parents realize. About a snake plant on a windowsill, still reaching toward light it cannot touch through the glass.
They don't make it. But what they build - and what it teaches them - is worth every page.

Darryl Wayne Townsend Jr. is the author of seventeen books spanning literary fiction, thrillers, novellas, and nonfiction. His work lives in the spaces between people - the things they can't say, the things they won't say, and the things they say to the wrong person. His novels include Still Water, Rare Pull, Taylor, Glass Empire, and Heavy Load. His nonfiction includes The Catalog Mindset and Don't Blow the Bag. He is the founder of Polymath Portfolio Group LLC and hosts the podcast Wait a Minute, Bitch on Spotify. He lives in Seattle. He is not done.