Page 12 of Jury Woman, Part 2 of 6

Lily crossed her arms. "This is so unfair. You get to just sit there while we deal with all of this."

I let that one pass without correction. "Lily, are you studying for your permit test? We talked about this."

"I've been busy." She examined her nails. "There hasn't exactly been time."

Before I could push further, Deputy Wells cleared his throat from his post by the door, the small, unmistakable signal that meant our window was closing.

"I have to go, guys. I love you both. Hang in there."

"You always say that and then you're just gone," Lily said, voice cracking. "Can't you have more time? Just once?"

"I wish I could, sweetheart. I really do."

The screen went dark on Josh's unfinished sentence, something about the uniform, cut off mid-word.

I sat there a moment longer than necessary, staring at my own reflection in the blank laptop glass and felt… relief.

Relief that I wasn't there arguing over who was going to take out the trash and who was going to walk Tucker and preparing four separate meals because everyone wanted something different.

I closed the laptop slowly and waited for the guilt to descend.

But it didn't.

August 13, Thursday

THE FORENSIC accountant took the stand with the unhurried precision of a man who clearly loved spreadsheets and by the second hour of his testimony, I was glad I had my knitting to keep me awake. In front of me, two jurors were nodding off.

"Defendant's Exhibit 14 shows a series of transfers from Blackthorne Holdings LLC to what's listed as a consulting firm in the Caymans," he explained, adjusting his glasses at the projector. "That consulting firm has no employees, no office space, and no discernible business activity beyond receiving these transfers."

Numbers scrolled across the screen—six figures, then seven, funneled through companies with names so deliberately bland they seemed engineered to be forgotten the moment you read them. Blackthorne Family Ventures. Meridian Property Partners. Coastal Sunrise Holdings. I thought of the HOA lien I'd once talked the board out of pursuing, the modest crisis of a few hundred dollars in unpaid dues, and felt the peculiar vertigo of two entirely different scales of dishonesty.

My needles kept moving through all of it, the basket-weave pattern deep enough now that I barely needed to look down.

At one point, glancing up to reposition my yarn, I caught the eye of a young attorney at the prosecution table—one of the junior associates who spent most of her days passing notes and organizing binders. She was looking at the blanket in my lap, an expression flickering across her face that I recognized instantly, the specific tenderness reserved for anything pink and half-finished and destined for someone small. She caught herself, glanced back at her legal pad, but not before I'd seen it. I wondered if she had children of her own or maybe aspired to.

My mind drifted, unbidden, to Lily and Josh as infants—the particular chaos of those years that had felt, at the time, like drowning, and now, from this distance, looked almost enviably simple. Warren coming home smelling like new-car interior, scooping up whichever child was fussing while I finally sat down for the first time all day. I remembered nursing Josh at two in the morning in the rocking chair by the window in our old house on Birchwood Lane, thinking with the exhausted, hormonal certainty of new motherhood that nothing would ever be harder than this.

I'd been wrong, obviously. But there had been an order to it back then, a shape to the days that made sense, even at their most sleepless—

"—and can you walk the jury through the significance of these particular transfer dates?" McDavid's voice pulled me back, sharp and direct.

I blinked, refocused, found my place in the testimony the way I'd find my place in a knitting pattern. The accountant was explaining how three of the largest transfers had occurred within days of documented meetings between Blackthorne and men the prosecution had already tied to the murder-for-hire charge.

Money moving. Meetings happening. This pattern seemed to be closing a loop around the man at the defense table.

August 14, Friday

WHEN WE filed into the courtroom, I immediately noticed Robert Blackthorne was absent. The prosecution and defense attorneys seemed extra alert. Judge Arnold entered with a folder tucked under his arm instead of his usual stack of papers, and something about the economy of it—just the one folder, held close—told me before he spoke that today's business would be brief and unpleasant.

"Before we resume testimony," he said, settling behind the bench, "I have an administrative matter to address. Alternate Juror Number One has been dismissed from this jury for reasons that will remain confidential to this court."

A small stir moved through the jury box. I didn't turn my head, but I felt the empty space where a woman I'd shared a bench with for six weeks—a soft-spoken paralegal from Marietta who kept peppermints in her purse and had once offered me one during a particularly grueling afternoon of forensic testimony—had once occupied.

"As a result," the judge continued, "Alternate Juror Number Two will move into the position of Alternate Juror Number One, Alternate Juror Number Three will move into the position of Alternate Juror Number Two, and Alternate Juror Number Four will move into the position of Alternate Juror Number Three."

I was being bumped up. I sat with the reshuffling of my own status for a moment, an unsettling promotion in a system where advancement meant that I'd moved one seat closer to more serious obligation—and consequences.

"This brings me to a matter I want to address with the entire panel," Judge Arnold said, his voice sharpening. "I remind each of you, in the strongest possible terms, that you are not to discuss any aspect of this case with anyone—not your spouse, not your children, not your closest friend, not a stranger in an elevator who asks an innocent question. This includes the substance of testimony, your own impressions of witnesses, or your opinions about guilt or innocence."