Page 23 of Jury Woman, Part 2 of 6

"Mrs. Cole, I'm very sorry for your loss," he began, and I believed, watching him, that he actually was. "I have to ask—do you have any personal knowledge connecting my client directly to your husband's death?"

"No," she said. "I only know what the detectives told me. That he was the primary suspect. That the case never closed."

"And you're aware he was never charged."

"I'm aware." Something flat and furious moved behind her eyes. "I'm also aware my husband is still dead, and nobody's ever answered for it."

"I'm sorry for your loss, but I understand that you have remarried."

A murmur sounded in the gallery. I understood Stone's implication—how much could Renata be grieving if she'd remarried? When Mrs. Cole's chin went up, tears glittered in her eyes.

"I found love again, but I will love Horatio until the day I die."

My heart squeezed. Had I ever loved Warren that much?

Stone had no response that wouldn't have sounded monstrous, and he sat down without pursuing it further.

I fixed the dropped stitch during the recess that followed, working the hook carefully back through the gap, restoring the row to something resembling order, though the tension through that section remained visibly different from the rows before and after it—tighter, somehow, a small permanent record of the ten minutes during which my attention had entirely left the yarn in my lap.

By the time court adjourned, I'd finished barely four rows of sage green, and every one of them, I suspected, would carry some faint evidence of Renata Cole's voice describing a conversation about milk.

August 28, Friday

COURT WAS dark again for reasons unknown to the jury. I woke to an entire unclaimed day stretching out ahead of me like a stitch pattern I hadn't tried before—unfamiliar enough to feel a little intimidating, appealing precisely because of that.

I carried the paperback I'd checked out from the small library cart the hotel kept for sequestered jurors out onto the balcony off my living area, settled into a metal chair with my feet propped on the railing, and let the late-August sun warm my shoulders while I opened to the first page.

I couldn't remember the last time I'd actually finished a book cover to cover. Not skimmed for book club discussion points I could bluff my way through over wine and cheese cubes, not abandoned somewhere around chapter four in favor of laundry or a school pickup or Warren needing something urgently that turned out not to be urgent at all. Actually finished. By the time I reached the last page, three hours had evaporated, and I sat there for a moment afterward simply enjoying the small, uncomplicated satisfaction of having completed something entirely for myself.

Back inside, I ran warm water in the soaking tub, dropped my feet in, and worked through a full pedicure with the little kit Elaine had given me—filed, buffed, painted a cheerful coral that matched nothing in particular and pleased me anyway. I tweezed my eyebrows into something closer to a shape than the overgrown apostrophes they'd become. In the mirror my face was starting to look less like a woman running on fumes and more like a woman who'd had a full night's sleep.

Then, on an impulse I didn't examine too closely, I picked up the small scissors from my toiletry bag and cut myself bangs.

They came out crooked at first, one side longer than the other, and I spent a tense five minutes correcting the imbalance with small, cautious snips until they framed my face in a soft fringe that made my eyes look larger, my whole expression somehow lighter. I stood there examining the result longer than was strictly necessary, turning my head side to side, and decided, with a small flush of pleasure, that I liked it. I looked like someone who'd made a decision about her own face for the first time in longer than I could calculate.

I carried the good feeling with me back out to the balcony, where the light had shifted toward early evening, gold and slanting, and pulled the hotel notepad from the desk drawer along with one of the cheap pens stamped with the hotel's logo.

I sat with the pen uncapped for a long time before writing anything at all.

My biography, I finally wrote at the top, then crossed it out, because it sounded like something written for a jacket flap, not for Jill, not for me.

I started again.

I don't know where to begin, so I'll begin here: I used to be a person who made decisions. Not enormous ones—not important ones, in the grand scheme—but mine. What to study in college. Who to marry, though I've had cause to question that one lately. When to have children. How to raise them. Somewhere along the way, without any single moment I can point to and blame, I stopped being the one who decided things and became the one who accommodated everyone else's decisions instead.

I paused, pen hovering, surprised at how easily the sentence had come, how much truer it felt written down than it ever had rattling around unexamined in my head.

I am forty-two years old, I continued, and I am trying to remember who I was before I started disappearing into everyone else's schedule.

The light kept fading while I wrote, and I kept writing anyway, filling one page and then reaching for another. My new bangs caught the breeze off the balcony. With my coral-tipped toes propped on the railing, I felt deliciously young again.

August 29, Saturday

WHEN WARREN'S face appeared, it was clear he was broadcasting from his bedroom at the apartment. He was shirtless, his hair standing up in a way that had nothing to do with sleep, and behind him the covers lay in a state of considerable disarray, a scrap of black lace visible against the white sheets in a way that made my stomach turn unpleasantly.

"Isabel." He didn't reach for a shirt. "What's up?"

I kept my eyes fixed determinedly on his face. "I wanted to talk to you about Lily and Scott. I'm worried things are getting too serious."