Page 2 of Jury Woman, Part 3 of 6

Twin shrugs, perfectly synchronized despite two years of practiced sibling disdain for anything the other one did.

"Have you talked to your dad about the laundry? He could show you how to use the machine."

Lily's face crumpled. "Dad doesn't care about anything except Heidi. He's basically never even home. He shows up, drops off pizza money, then disappears until midnight. We've had DoorDash six nights straight," she went on, gathering steam now. "Six. I'm going to get so fat, Mom, and nobody even cares."

Josh lifted his hand. "I've had pizza every single night and I feel great."

"MOM." Lily's voice cracked upward into a register I associated with fire alarms. "Are you even listening? This is a crisis."

"I'm listening," I said, keeping my voice level though something in my stomach had begun to twist. "I hear you. It sounds hard."

"It is hard. You have no idea what it's like here."

"You could call Aunt Elaine," I offered. "She's five minutes away, and she'd come do a load of laundry with you in ten minutes if you asked."

Lily's face shut like a door. "I don't want Aunt Elaine. I want you."

To be there to do things for her, I realized. "I know, sweetheart, but I'm not able to be there right now."

"Because you'd rather be on some jury than take care of us."

"That's not fair, Lily."

"Nothing about this is fair."

She reached forward, and the screen went dark before I could answer.

I sat there a long moment, the small conference room humming faintly around me, one hand pressed flat against my stomach where the ache had settled and would probably be there for four more months.

September 3, Thursday

I'VE STARTED keeping a private inventory of my fellow jurors, the way you'd catalog strangers at a party where everyone seems to know each other better than you do. Juror number one, Priya Chandrasekaran, sits two seats away from me.

She's a pediatric anesthesiologist. I learned that during selection, back when we were still strangers reciting our professions for the attorneys, and it explained something about her stillness, the economy of movement. A woman who's spent her career putting children under and bringing them back must have nerves of steel.

This morning, while a ballistics expert droned through trajectory angles, I watched her take notes the way I imagine she charts vitals: small, precise letters marching in perfectly straight lines, no crossed-out words, no doodles in the margins.

At the mid-morning recess, another juror leaned toward me and murmured that Priya would make a fine foreperson when the time came to choose one. I found myself nodding in agreement before I acknowledged a little stab of envy.

I don't think I'm jealous of her, exactly. It's more complicated than that. It's sitting beside someone who spends her days holding a child's life steady under anesthesia, while I've spent mine holding together carpool schedules and a marriage that fell apart anyway. She has letters after her name. I have a business degree I barely used before deciding diapers were more urgent than spreadsheets, and I've spent the years since explaining what I "do" in apologetic tones.

But that's on me.

During a sidebar this afternoon, I overheard her answer a question another juror had about drug interactions. Her voice was even and unhurried, and every juror in earshot simply deferred, the way you defer to someone who clearly knows more than you do about the thing being discussed. Nobody deferred to me that way. Nobody looked to me to untangle anything.

Except yarn.

I caught myself wondering what Priya would think if she knew the sum of my expertise was double-pointed needles and a gift for getting in and out of Costco in the most efficient manner. It felt like a small, embarrassing thing to be proud of, next to her accomplishments.

And yet.

At lunch, she sat across from me in the hotel conference room we use as a makeshift cafeteria, unwrapped her sandwich with the same tidy precision she brought to everything else, and asked how I was holding up since being bumped to full juror. I told her, mostly honestly, that it felt like being handed something heavier than I expected to carry.

"It should feel heavy," she said. "The day it stops feeling heavy is the day you've stopped paying attention." She said it simply, without any performance of wisdom, and went back to her sandwich as if she hadn't just handed me something I'd be turning over for the rest of the afternoon.

I don't think Priya intends to make anyone around her feel smaller. That's entirely my own doing, some old habit of comparing myself downward and finding myself lacking, a habit I apparently packed along with the yarn and the Elaine's borrowed blazers when I left for this hotel.

September 4, Friday