Page 5 of Jury Woman, Part 3 of 6

Between the kids who couldn't be bothered to stay on the call and a sister I'd just wounded for no good reason, I sat with the uncomfortable feeling that no matter which direction I turned, I was lost.

September 7, Monday

COURT WAS dark for the holiday, which meant an entire day stretching out ahead of me with nothing on it but my own name.

It felt luxurious.

I started at the hotel gym, a cramped room with two treadmills and a rack of dumbbells that had clearly seen better decades, tucked at the end of a hallway near the service elevator. Deputy Wells was posted near the door when I arrived, which I hadn't expected on a holiday. I was suddenly self-conscious of the leggings I'd packed almost as an afterthought. And I was aware of my breathing as I climbed onto the treadmill, aware of him in my peripheral vision the entire forty minutes I spent working up a sweat. He never looked at me directly but knowing he was there made me hyperconscious of how I moved, how I looked doing it. I told myself it didn't matter. If the man was looking at me, all he saw was another juror among the hundreds, maybe thousands of jurors he'd guarded over the years. When I left, I nodded briefly and he nodded back.

Nothing special.

Later in the day I drew myself a warm bath and poured a glass of the cheap chardonnay from the mini fridge that the hotel stocked for jurors who needed exactly this kind of small mercy. I sat in the water until my fingertips pruned, refilled the glass once the water had gone lukewarm, and by the time I climbed out I had a pleasant, unfamiliar looseness in my limbs.

I wrapped myself in the hotel robe, settled into the armchair by the window, and pulled out the notebook Jill Mathers had given me. Consider it a place to get things out of your head.

I wrote without any plan, the wine loosening whatever filter usually stood between my thoughts and the page. I don't know who decided motherhood meant disappearing, I scrawled, the letters slanting more than usual. Nobody handed me that rule. I think I just absorbed it, the way you absorb weather. I wrote about my guilt over the lack of guilt I felt about leaving my family. I wrote about Lily's tears and Josh's avoidance and Warren's accusation that I never listened to him. The sentences ran together, lost their punctuation, wandered into places I hadn't meant to go and then, somewhere in the middle of a thought about my mother's hands teaching mine to cast on stitches, the words simply stopped coming.

I woke an hour later with the notebook slid halfway off my lap and a faint crease from the chair's arm printed into my cheek.

When the dinner hour came around, I heard the others gathering down the hall and I decided I'd rather eat alone. I ordered a club sandwich, ate it cross-legged on the bed straight from the tray, and put on a movie I'd been meaning to watch for two years and never had the uninterrupted quiet for. I watched the whole thing start to finish without pausing once.

By the time I climbed into bed, the sheets cool and the room dark except for the sliver of light under the bathroom door, a small voice surfaced in the back of my mind—the one that keeps a running tally of everyone else's needs against my own indulgences, the one that wanted to know how I could justify a day like this while my kids were at home melting down.

I couldn't. And I didn't want to.

I turned off the lamp, pulled the covers up, and let myself simply be a woman who'd had a pleasant, unbothered day.

September 8, Tuesday

THE MEDICAL examiner took the stand this morning, and within the first five minutes I understood why every juror in that box instinctively turned toward juror number three Ashanti Doyle the moment the terminology got thick.

The M.E. used words like petechial hemorrhaging and lividity patterns as though we'd all spent our careers in a morgue alongside him, and I watched half the panel's faces go carefully blank, the universal expression of people nodding along to a language they don't speak. But Ashanti leaned forward slightly, and when the prosecutor paused to let the jury absorb a particularly dense stretch of testimony, she caught my eye and murmured, low enough for just our row, "He means the bruising happened before death, not after." No performance in it, no showing off. Just a woman accustomed to breaking down what a doctor said into something a frightened family can actually hold onto.

She's thirty-three, younger than I expected when I first learned her profession, with the kind of stillness under pressure that I associate with people who've spent years being the calm center of other people's worst nights. She's a nurse practitioner who works nights at Emory's ER, Atlanta's busiest trauma center. From hallway conversations, I know she's raising a five-year-old mostly on her own, with her mother filling in the gaps.

"I missed her first day of kindergarten," she told me once. "But my mama sent pictures. She looked so small in that uniform, but she did just fine."

Today, watching her absorb the pathologist's testimony, I felt grateful for the members of the jury who brought expertise to the process. And I wondered again why I'd been selected. Warren's previous remark that they were going for the soccer mom demographic might've been on point—it wasn't like I brought anything else to the table.

Did other jurors resent me? I think I would, if I were in their shoes.

At lunch Ashanti mentioned, almost in passing, that her daughter had asked on last night's video call when Mommy was coming home, and that she hadn't had a real answer to give.

"I understand," I said automatically, then gave her a smile.

"We're in it together," she said. "Long-distance mamas." Then she patted my hand.

I felt like a fraud. I would've missed my kids like crazy if I'd been away from them when they were younger, but now… notsomuch.

And it was starting to concern me.

September 9, Wednesday

MARSHAL WELLS took his position near the door as I settled in for the video call, close enough to be present, far enough to make it clear he wasn't listening—or pretending not to. I was aware of him anyway. The man emitted… energy.

Lily filled the screen, already mid-complaint.

"The house smells, Mom. Like, actually smells. I think something died in Josh's bathroom, honestly the CDC would probably condemn it if they saw it."