Page 13 of Jury Woman, Part 3 of 6

The witness was a digital forensics expert, a slight man with wire-rimmed glasses who'd apparently decided the jury needed a full vocabulary lesson before he'd part with a single useful fact. Metadata. Hash values. Chain of custody protocols as they pertain to cellular extraction. I found myself leaning forward despite the density of it, knitting like a madwoman, genuinely fascinated by the idea that a phone could hold a shadow record of everywhere it had ever been.

Rodger, beside Hank Park, had stopped writing entirely. He sat with his arms crossed, jaw set, radiating the impatience of a man who fixed furnaces for a living and had no tolerance for four-dollar words. At one point, when the witness circled back for the third time to define "cell tower triangulation," Rodger exhaled through his nose loud enough that Dwayne Fitch glanced over with a grin he was clearly fighting to suppress.

I felt an odd flicker of defensiveness on the witness's behalf, which surprised me. I liked the density of it, the careful building of one term on another. It felt like the difference between someone rushing to a conclusion and someone showing their work, and showing your work had always struck me as a form of respect for the people who'd eventually have to trust it.

At the break, Rodger caught my eye in the hallway and shook his head with a rueful half-smile. "Man could've said all that in ten minutes."

"I don't know," I said, careful, aware of the invisible fence around anything resembling the actual case. "I found it kind of interesting, honestly."

"Interesting like a nap is interesting." He laughed, not unkindly, and tapped the closet-calendar joke that had apparently become his whole personality among the panel. "Eighty days and counting. I could've had my whole basement finished by now."

I bristled. Something about the flippancy of it hit me the wrong way—as if the six months were purely an inconvenience to be endured rather than a burden that came stapled to a man's future. I didn't say that, obviously. I just nodded and let it go, the way you let go of a stray thread rather than pull on it.

Back in the box that afternoon, I noticed him again during an especially dense bout of testimony—his knee bouncing, his gaze drifting toward the windows high above the gallery, visibly counting off the minutes. And I caught myself doing the thing Jill had warned me about, the quiet, uncharitable arithmetic of deciding who was taking this seriously and who wasn't.

I didn't know him well enough yet to know if that judgment was fair. But I filed the feeling away anyway, a small, private note beside all my other notes, and wondered—when the day finally came that twelve of us sat around a table and had to actually talk—whether his impatience and my carefulness would end up on opposing sides.

September 19, Saturday

I SAT down in front of the laptop ten minutes early, going through the small ritual Jill had suggested weeks ago and that I'd only recently started taking seriously—four counts in through the nose, hold for four, out for six, over and over, until my pulse steadied and slowed. You don't have to win this conversation, I told myself. You just have to get through it without giving him anything to use.

Deputy Wells stood by the door in his usual spot, watchful, and somehow also giving the impression he wasn't listening at all, though I knew better by now. I'd stopped being able to pretend these calls happened in private. Today, of all days, I wished I could.

Warren's face filled the screen a minute after I dialed, his tie already loosened, a stack of folders visible behind him. Saturday—office. Some things never changed.

"Five minutes," he said, by way of hello. "I've got a client call."

"This won't take long." I kept my voice level, businesslike, the tone I used to use running PTA meetings when a parent wanted to relitigate the bake sale. "We need to talk about your schedule with the kids. They have too much unsupervised time."

"They're fine, Isabel. They're teenagers, not toddlers."

"They're teenagers whose parents just went through a divorce, and now this is happening. You should be checking Josh's grades weekly, not waiting for a progress report to tell you he's failing algebra. And Lily needs an actual curfew, not a suggestion."

Warren rubbed a hand over his face, the gesture of a man wronged. "Fine. I'll tighten things up." A pause, calculated in a way I recognized from years of marriage. "But that probably means Heidi moves into the house. I can't be there every hour myself, not with my workload. She's around more than I am anyway at this point."

I felt the words land somewhere behind my sternum, a small, precise blow. Heidi. In my kitchen. In the house I'd chosen the paint colors for.

In my bed.

I glanced, involuntarily, toward the door. Wells hadn't moved, hadn't so much as shifted his weight, but I was suddenly, acutely aware of every word traveling across the room to him—my ex-husband's girlfriend, my absent motherhood, laid out for a federal marshal to overhear like gossip at a hair salon. Heat crawled up my neck.

I wanted to say no. I wanted to say absolutely not, find another solution, wanted to remind him whose name was still on the deed. But I had asked for supervision. I had asked for accountability. And there was no version of this sentence that let me have one without conceding the other.

I counted—one, two, three, four, five—the way Jill had taught me, silent and deliberate, giving the anger somewhere to go besides my mouth.

"Okay," I said finally, my voice steadier than I felt. "Whatever gets them looked after properly. That's what matters."

Warren looked faintly surprised, as if he'd braced for a fight and found none waiting. "Okay. Good. I've got to run."

The screen went dark. I sat there a moment, hands flat on the table, aware that I had just handed my husband's girlfriend a key to my old life and called it victory.

September 20, Sunday

THE SCREEN filled with three faces jammed into the frame. Elaine sat wedged between Lily and Josh on the couch like a referee. I knew before anyone said a word that this call was going to cost me something.

"Heidi is moving in?" Lily's voice hit a pitch I hadn't heard from her since she was small enough to throw herself on a grocery store floor. "Dad told us this morning like it was already decided!"

"I know," I said. "I said it was okay."