Page 17 of Jury Woman, Part 3 of 6

September 25, Friday

JUROR NUMBER ten Grant Kessler carried a legal pad the way other people carried a phone—constantly, compulsively, covered in a lattice of arrows and boxes that made it look less like note-taking and more like blueprints for something structural. I'd caught glimpses of it over the past few weeks without really registering what it was, but today, I finally got a proper look: names connected by lines, dates stacked in a column, little flags where two facts seemed to contradict each other.

"You color-code your notes," I said, more statement than question.

"You have to, or it's chaos by week six." He tapped a yellow highlighted section with something like pride. "Yellow's financial stuff. Blue's anything location-based—phone records, surveillance, that kind of thing. Red's when two witnesses say something that doesn't quite line up." He glanced at me. "You want me to walk you through the system? It's actually pretty simple once you see the logic."

"I think I'm all right," I said.

"Sure, sure. Just—if you ever want a second opinion on the timeline, I've basically got the whole thing mapped." He said it easily, without arrogance exactly, more like a man who'd built something he was proud of and couldn't quite help offering it up. It reminded me of Josh's science fair volcano a few years back, the pure eagerness of a kid who wanted you to appreciate the baking soda eruption as much as he did.

The morning's testimony crawled through financial records, an accountant walking us through transfer dates with the flat cadence of someone reading a grocery list, and I watched Grant's pen move the entire time, cross-referencing dates against his own chart, occasionally frowning and drawing a small red flag beside something. Beside him, Rodger leaned over at one point to glance at the page, and the two of them exchanged a look—not quite words, since we weren't allowed those, but something that passed between them anyway, a shared recognition of some detail that hadn't matched.

At the break, Grant fell into step beside me toward the coffee station, unprompted. "You've got kids, right? I saw you on a call once, waiting for the room."

"Two teenagers. You?"

"Two kids also. Nine and eleven. I do video calls every night the schedule allows—it's in the custody agreement, actually, written in. My ex and I hammered it out pretty specifically." He said it matter-of-factly. He'd clearly spent real effort turning a broken marriage into a set of workable parameters. "It helps, having it spelled out. Less room for things to go sideways."

"That sounds smart," I said, thinking of Warren, of Heidi rearranging my pantry, of the utter absence of anything resembling a spelled-out agreement in my own dissolving household.

"I used to think emotions and logistics were separate things," he said. "Divorce taught me they're actually the same problem wearing different clothes. If the schedule's solid, everybody's got less to fight about."

I filed that away, oddly comforted by it, even as some other part of me bristled slightly at how neatly he'd packaged something so messy into a system with color-coded flags. It was the kind of certainty that probably served him well running a project timeline, but might serve him less well in a room full of eleven other adults.

Still, walking back to the box, I found myself glad he was there—glad someone in the room was keeping such careful track of every contradiction, even if I suspected his charts and my own quieter sense of things wouldn't always reconcile once the real reckoning came.

September 26, Saturday

I SAT down in front of the laptop expecting Warren's usual solo appearance—loosened tie, stack of folders, the jerky movements of a man doing me a favor by showing up at all—so when the screen resolved into two faces instead of one, it took me a full second to understand what I was looking at.

Heidi.

She sat beside him, tucked into the crook of his arm, her hair the kind of effortless blond that costs a great deal of money to look effortless. She smiled at the camera with bright, easy warmth, the distinct brand of pleasant that beautiful young women extend to older women who've gone to seed.

"I thought it made sense to loop Heidi in," Warren said, before I could ask. "She's around the kids so much now, it seemed silly to keep pretending otherwise."

"Hi, Isabel," Heidi said, giving a small wave, her smile never wavering. "I've heard so much about you."

I opened my mouth. Nothing arrived to fill it.

It was the room behind them that finally registered—the headboard, the reading lamp on the nightstand I'd chosen from a catalog eleven years ago, the slant of afternoon light through blinds I'd installed myself. My bedroom. Correction: my former bedroom. They were sitting on my bed, propped against pillows that used to be mine. Ugh.

"I moved your clothes into the guest room, by the way," Warren added, conversational, as if reporting on lawn care. "Heidi needed the closet space. Made more sense to consolidate."

I heard Deputy Wells shift near the door, and when I glanced over, he'd turned his face fully toward the wall, giving me total privacy. The kindness of it should've helped. Instead it only sharpened the humiliation—the fact that a federal marshal now understood, in granular detail, exactly how thoroughly I'd been replaced.

Heat crawled up my neck and settled in my cheeks, and I stared at the small rectangle of my own face in the corner of the screen, trying to find some expression that wasn't devastation.

"That's—" I started, and stalled there, the sentence with nowhere left to go.

"Oh, and I hired a housekeeper," Warren said, moving briskly past whatever I might have said next. "Comes twice a week now. Heidi's not really used to living in clutter, and honestly, the place needed it."

I nodded. I actually nodded, the way you nod at a stranger's small talk in an elevator, some autopilot function taking over where the rest of me had gone quiet.

"That's great," I heard myself say, the words leaving my mouth with no input from whatever part of me still felt things.

Warren smiled, satisfied, the smile of a man closing out a to-do list. "Don't worry about any of it. Everything's under control here."