Page 9 of Jury Woman, Part 2 of 6

"He forgot the early dismissal thing on Friday, too," Josh added. "We stood outside for forty minutes."

"I'll talk to him," I said, filing this away with the small, tired resignation of a woman adding one more item to a list that never got shorter. "Also, the last time I checked, school buses were still coming through our neighborhood."

The reaction was instantaneous and identically horrified.

"Mom." Lily's voice dropped an octave, as though I'd suggested something obscene. "The bus is for kids whose parents don't care."

"That's not remotely—"

"It's for, like, the kids who live in apartments," Josh said, with the casual cruelty of a fourteen-year-old repeating something he hadn't examined too closely.

I was speechless and saddened by how much I'd let down my kids by not teaching them humility and gratitude.

"I'm riding with Scott from now on," Lily announced.

I let that go, filing it under battles for another day, and turned to Josh instead. "How's everything else? How's Tucker doing with the new schedule?"

"Fine, I guess." He picked at the edge of the counter. "Mrs. Patterson asked if you left."

My stomach bounced. "Left?"

"Like, left us. She was being weird about it."

Before I could stop myself, I glanced toward the door where Deputy Wells stood with his usual professional stillness.

"Josh, did you tell her anything about where I am? About the trial?"

"No. You said not to tell anyone." He said it with the wounded dignity of a kid who'd actually followed instructions for once and wanted credit.

"Good. That's good, honey. What did you tell her?"

He shrugged again. "That you were away on a long vacation."

I closed my eyes briefly. A vacation. Somewhere in the cul-de-sac, Meg White was almost certainly logging this information for later distribution, filing it neatly beside my divorce and Warren's early-morning gym habit. By Tuesday half of Alpharetta would have me sunning myself on a beach somewhere while my children fended for themselves, and there wasn't a single thing I could do to correct the record.

Deputy Wells caught my eye and gave the smallest tilt of his head toward the clock.

"I'm almost out of time," I told them. "Take care of Tucker. Look out for each other, okay? I love you both."

Lily reached forward and the screen went dark before the sentence had fully landed, no goodbye, just the abrupt absence where her face had been.

I sat for a moment in the quiet room before Wells escorted me back down the hall. I told myself this was building something in them—self-sufficiency, resilience, the kind of independence I hadn't exactly modeled for eighteen years. I told myself the same thing about myself, actually, and mostly believed it.

August 10, Monday

THE HOTEL conference room had been repurposed with two armchairs angled toward each other and a small table holding a box of tissues that seemed like a rather pointed piece of set dressing. Deputy Wells walked me to the door, then took up a position in the hallway with his hands clasped in front of him, present but pointedly out of earshot.

Jill Mathers rose when I entered—a trim woman in her fifties with silver-streaked hair pulled into a loose knot and reading glasses pushed up on her head. Her handshake was warm and unhurried, and something in her face put me at ease before either of us had said anything.

"Isabel. Please, have a seat."

I perched on the edge of the armchair. "I have to confess, I don't really know what I'm supposed to do or say here."

"That's all right. There's no script." Jill settled back, a woman who'd clearly had this exact opening exchange with dozens of anxious jurors before me. "I'm not here to evaluate your fitness for anything, and nothing you tell me goes back to the judge or the attorneys. My only job is to make sure this experience doesn't grind you down more than it has to. Think of it as a conversation, not an interview."

That loosened something in my shoulders.

She asked about my life with the easy curiosity of someone genuinely interested rather than checking boxes, and I answered plainly—the divorce, the two teenagers, the empty side of the closet I still hadn't reorganized, the knitting that had somehow followed me into a federal courthouse and become, of all things, a talking point. Jill nodded along, letting silences stretch without rushing to fill them the way most people did.