Page 6 of Jury Woman, Part 2 of 6

Silence answered me, thick with the particular sullenness only teenagers can manufacture on command.

"I'll call you again Sunday," I said. "And your dad and I will be talking every Saturday about your schedules. I love you. Please walk the dog."

Josh grunted something that might have been goodbye. Lily leaned toward the camera one final time, stuck out her tongue with theatrical disdain, and the screen went black.

I sat there a moment, staring at my own reflection in the laptop screen, throat tight and stinging.

When I stepped into the hallway, Deputy Wells was exactly where he'd said he'd be, posture easy, gaze fixed politely on some middle distance that wasn't me. If he'd heard any of it, he gave no indication.

We walked back toward my room in a silence I couldn't quite hold together. Somewhere around the elevator, my eyes betrayed me, and I swiped quickly at my cheek, hoping the motion looked like I was pushing back a stray piece of hair.

At my door, he paused, reached into his breast pocket, and produced a folded white handkerchief—soft cotton, pressed at the corners, smelling faintly of cedar when he pressed it into my palm.

Then he offered a small, careful smile, touched the brim of his hat, and turned down the hallway without a word.

August 6, Thursday

BRYAN STONE rose for the defense's opening statement wearing a sharply pleated charcoal suit. He buttoned his jacket with a flourish and approached the jury box with his arms already in motion.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the prosecution wants you to see a monster." He paused for effect, letting the word settle over us. "I'm going to show you a businessman."

For the next hour, he built an alternate architecture out of the same set of facts the prosecution had spent two days laying brick by brick. Where they'd shown shell companies, he showed diversified holdings. Where they'd shown wiretapped calls full of coded language, he showed a man who simply preferred discretion in his affairs. He had a gift for making suspicion sound like envy, for making the government's whole case sound like a grudge dressed up in a subpoena.

I found myself glancing, more than once, at Robert Blackthorne. His attorney was performing an act of considerable devotion on his behalf, reframing him as a misunderstood entrepreneur, a man persecuted for his success. Blackthorne did not look grateful. He sat with his jaw set, arms crossed over his prison-issue button-down, staring at some fixed point like a man enduring a dentist appointment rather than his own defense. Once, when Stone gestured toward him and called him "a devoted father and a pillar of his community," Blackthorne's mouth curled into a small smile. It was the first time I'd seen warmth enter his expression.

The man loved his kids.

The revelation hit me hard and I couldn't help but compare him to my ex. Which wasn't fair. Warren had adored the kids when they were small. But as they'd developed into little people with their own activities and schedules, he'd resented the time it took away from his ambitions.

I forced my attention back to the drama unfolding before me. Stone talked nonstop for over an hour, painting Robert Blackthorne as a rounded person with real problems and a traumatic past. He'd lost his parents in a car accident when he was a preteen and had bounced through the foster care system. As an adult, he'd had many failed businesses and two bouts with cancer. By the time Stone thanked us and returned to his table, Robert Blackthorne seemed less like the volatile monster the U.S. Attorney had described, and more like a hardworking businessman who was angry at being wrongly accused.

Mere days in, and my opinion of the man was already waffling.

Judge Arnold glanced at the clock, then at us. "Given the length of today's proceedings, I'm releasing the jury early. We'll resume with witness testimony tomorrow morning."

A ripple of surprised gratitude went through the box. I gathered my knitting bag and filed out with the others, back into the custody of marshals I didn't recognize—Deputy Wells wasn't on rotation that afternoon, a fact I noted and then scolded myself for noting.

The hotel felt different with an entire afternoon stretching in front of it, unclaimed. Back in my room, I stood in the small rectangle of space between the bed and the window, oddly unmoored. No calendar to fill in. No child requiring a ride, a signature, or cash. Just me, a mini-fridge humming its one note, and the muffled sound of someone two doors down running a vacuum.

I scrolled through the binder of pre-approved films—nothing current, nothing with so much as a stray headline that might taint an impartial mind—and settled on an old romantic comedy I'd seen a dozen times, back when Warren and I used to fall asleep on the couch with a bowl of popcorn balanced between us. The actress's voice was as familiar as a lullaby.

From my travel bag, I dug out the manicure kit Elaine had once slipped into my Christmas stocking with a note that read for when you finally take five minutes for yourself, Iz. I filed my nails to smooth ovals, pushed back the cuticles, and painted them a soft coral that I would never have chosen for myself in the harried, catalog-order chaos of ordinary life.

I let the second coat dry with my hands splayed on a hotel pillow, careful not to smudge, the television murmuring its familiar plot toward its familiar happy ending.

It occurred to me, watching my nails catch the lamplight, that I hadn't had an uninterrupted afternoon like this in longer than I could calculate. It felt like an extravagant luxury to tend to something as inconsequential and entirely mine as my own two hands.

August 7, Friday

THE PROSECUTION'S next witness walked in like a man who'd spent a career ducking through doorways built for smaller people. Detective Jack Terry, Atlanta PD homicide, filled the witness stand. Broad through the shoulders, a jaw that looked like it had absorbed a few punches over the years, and a gold wedding band that caught the fluorescent light when he raised his hand to be sworn in.

He had the kind of face that made you want to trust him and the kind of eyes—deep-set, faintly bruised beneath—that suggested he'd earned every line in it the hard way. Not handsome in the magazine sense. Handsome in the sense of a man who'd carried things and it showed.

I wondered, absurdly, what his wife was like. Whether she waited up on nights or whether she'd learned long ago that waiting up didn't change what time he walked through the door. I wondered if she still reached for him at three a.m. out of habit, or if the marriage had rearranged itself around his absences. Being married to a cop seemed like its own kind of sequestration—love conducted mostly through the relief of a car pulling safely into the driveway.

Being married to a cop, I realized, required its own kind of bravery.

Lorna McDavid approached him with the brisk familiarity of two professionals who'd worked together before. "Detective Terry, please describe your role in the investigation of Horatio Alvarez's death."