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“What?” Audrey asked.
Aunt Kelli sniffed. “They had him on CCTV, didn’t they? The entire world knows he did what he did.” She turned to look Amanda in the eye. “Let me get this straight. The parents are angry with you for not getting their kid a not-guilty verdict? When it was literally an impossible task?”
Amanda winced. “When I first took on the case, Mom and I talked about expectations with the Arnouts,” she remembered. “We reminded them that our job was to whittle the sentence down from five to eight years to one or two.”
“Mr. Arnout looked like he blew a fuse,” Susan remembered.
“Which isn’t uncommon in situations like that,” Amanda said. “People don’t like to hear that prison is a given. But I figured they’d come around to it, especially after the trial. They spent hours listening to the prosecution’s witnesses, hearing about their evidence, and watching the CCTV footage. And they still came away with the ever-loving belief that their son is an angel.”
“They should be studied by psychologists,” Audrey scoffed. A split second later, her face melted, and she added, “Although it would be horrible to learn that Max had done something so heinous. I can’t pretend to know what my brain would do in that case. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to accept it either.”
“But you wouldn’t use your time, connections, and resources to ruin the lawyer’s life,” Susan pointed out.
“No. I would hide myself in a cave and never come out,” Audrey said.
* * *
Amanda could recite Hilton Arnout’s case verbatim. Probably she always could, now that it was the case that had rocked her life like a tsunami to a fishing boat.
A rich playboy with too much time on his hands, Hilton had spent his years after graduating from Harvard traveling all over the world. He’d spent months in Thailand, Japan, and Bali. He’d sunk a yacht—on accident or on purpose, it wasn’t clear—outside Istanbul. He’d gotten married once to an Indian princess in Mumbai and then left her two weeks after the grand affair with a French model who looked vaguely like Brigitte Bardot. It was said he was so hated in India that her father would immediately have him killed if he ever returned. This seemed to only add fuel to the fire that was Hilton Arnout.
It wasn’t clear exactly why Hilton returned to Harvard for graduate school. Amanda guessed his father had pitched it to him as a good idea. Maybe he wanted him to have the credentials to take over the Arnout money and businesses one day. Perhaps he just wanted Hilton to calm down a little bit.
At twenty-four, Hilton returned to Harvard as a graduate student in International Relations. He lived in a gorgeous three-story Victorian near campus that was soon widely known as the party spot. Only the most beautiful undergraduate girls and the most promising graduate men could attend—plus Hilton’s wide array of friends who came from other cities and countries to have the “college party experience.” It was presumed that Hilton met Caitlin Carson at one of these parties. She was twenty years old, blond, with very long legs and very bright teeth, and always in attendance. She sort of looked like Brigitte Bardot, too. Hilton clearly had a type.
Hilton limped his way through his first semesters of graduate school. According to the Harvard professors Amanda had interviewed as she’d prepared for the case, Hilton hardly did anything toward his graduate degree. The dean put pressure on the professors to ensure that Hilton passed. “Everyone knew who he was and what his connections were,” a female professor explained to Amanda. “Tenured professors were too frightened to get on the dean’s bad side, and non-tenured professors didn’t have a choice at all. We had to smile and joke with Hilton. We were all in it.”
But everything changed at the end of the second semester. Caitlin Carson’s grades suffered (presumably because of those wild parties), and the dean threatened to kick her out of school. He did not know that Caitlin and Hilton were in love, nor that Hilton’s brand of love bordered on obsession. He was always “all in, or all out.”
“When Caitlin came to him crying one afternoon, I knew something was up,” a male ex-friend of Hilton’s explained to Amanda via email. “He had this fire in his eyes I’ll never forget. I suggested he just call the dean to, you know, explain that Caitlin was his girlfriend. I figured that would calm everything down. The dean would retract his threat, you know? But instead, Hilton got it in his head that he wanted to punish the dean. I think he’d seen too many films. Maybe he wanted to prove himself to Caitlin. He was feeling old and stupid. He knew he was only getting through grad school because everyone feared his father and the dean.”
On the night of May 21, 2023, Hilton Arnout and Caitlin Carson broke into the dean’s house at 11:32 p.m. The date and time were known because of CCTV footage; it would always be drilled into Amanda’s brain.
It wasn’t clear exactly why Hilton wanted Caitlin to come with him. Amanda’s theory was that he needed someone to see just how wild he was about to get. He needed a witness. And what better witness than his girlfriend?
It was also known that Hilton and Caitlin were very drunk and high on drugs at the time of the break-in. Witnesses had seen them doing Molly and coke before ducking out into the night.
Hilton didn’t wait long before breaking something. He smashed three multi-thousand-dollar vases in the foyer and used the dust to write terrible words across the floor. Caitlin laughed and goaded him on. After that, they went to the dining room, the living room, and the bedroom to destroy more property, pour water on technological equipment, and throw things out the window. More than one million dollars in damages was recorded—an impressive feat for one guy walking through a house with his girlfriend.
But when they reached the dean’s “game room,” the story shifted. The dean was a collector of ancient weapons, including Grecian javelins, old stone tips, a basilisk cannon, and many samurai swords. Hilton had handled samurai swords in Japan and was a collector of sorts. He brandished one of them excitedly—out of his mind with drugs—and swooshed it around. Caitlin wasn’t prepared and didn’t jump out of the way in time. And suddenly, blood was everywhere. He’d gotten her on the upper arm and the lower stomach. All of the neighbors reported hearing her screams at 1:10 a.m. It was incredible that they’d already been in the house for nearly two hours by that point. Two hours of destruction.
The cops and ambulance arrived a few minutes later. They bolted through the chaos of the dean’s house to find Caitlin passed out in Hilton’s arms and blood everywhere. They immediately arrested Hilton and took Caitlin to the hospital. The dean was called. He was vacationing on Nantucket—with Hilton’s parents, ironically enough. He was back by morning.
Caitlin did not die, thank goodness. She didn’t even lose her arm. She spent several weeks in the hospital, where her parents refused to let her see Hilton Arnout. By then, Hilton’s father had bailed him out and contacted the “top defense attorney” on the East Coast, Susan Sheridan. Overloaded with casework, Susan roped in her daughter, Amanda, calling her “the best of the best.”
“You have to understand,” Mr. Arnout had told Amanda over the phone. “Our son is a victim of a horrible witch hunt.”
Amanda was accustomed to people’s delusions when it came to cases and their or their loved one’s criminality. But the Arnouts had surprised her with their certainty. It was as though they lived on another planet. For them, Hilton was not guilty, not in the least. The CCTV was doctored. Everyone was after their wealth and power. Period.
However, the Arnouts didn’t account for the power of Caitlin’s family. Caitlin Carson was a Harvard undergrad for reasons similar to Hilton's. Her father knew people who knew people. And the prosecution attacked Hilton from all angles—regarding his dramatic history, his lack of respect for others’ property, and his attempt at the manslaughter of Caitlin Carson. The fact that he was a great deal older than Caitlin was—in a position of power when compared to her—did nothing to help their case.
It was actually incredible that Amanda had been able to knock the sentence down to a year.
A part of her felt guilty for that. Hilton was the sort of man who belonged behind bars for a lot longer. He was a menace to himself and others. And it seemed clear that the minute he left prison, he would be back to his old tricks again. Caitlin wouldn’t be his only victim. But that was the nature of the criminal justice system. Very rich people could get away with a whole lot, while very poor people could hardly pickpocket a wallet without doing time.
* * *
The kitchen light glowed through the darkness, and Sam’s car was in the driveway. Amanda braced herself. There was no telling what kind of mood he’d be in. She wanted to be supportive no matter what.
