“I know you are, Andrew. Have you decided to tell your father?”
“I don’t know.” I turned and looked in the window of the coffee shop and saw Dad staring out at me. “Sometimes, I think it would be okay to tell him, but then I also worry about the stress it’ll put on him.”
“He’s your father, Andrew. He cares about you more than anything.”
“I know.” I sighed. “I’ll think about it. At least now I have an actual court date set with no chance for a change in pleas. If I had told my dad earlier, he would have been sick with worry this whole time.”
“Well, as you said, now you have a court date and can tell your father.”
“I’ll think about it,” I confirmed.
“If you can’t, I’ll be there at the hearing by your side.”
“Thank you, James.”
James always had my back.
* * *
“Hey,Dad. I’m not going to be able to make it to the coffee house until this afternoon,” I explained once I was all dressed and ready to head to the courthouse.
“Is everything okay?”
“It is. I’m just running late and will be in this afternoon.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him the truth, but I just couldn’t. In the back of my mind, I still worried. If I thought that a simple fib about having a doctor’s appointment would have gotten me out of this, I would have gone for that option. But I figured the moment I mentioned a doctor’s appointment that he’d stress and worry I was sick, and it wasn’t worth all of that.
“Okay, I’ll see you this afternoon, and we’ll go over the schedule and deliveries then,” he said.
“Sounds good. See you later, Dad.”
I hung up, and the brick in my stomach rotated just enough to remind me of the guilt I felt for not telling him the truth. I just needed the morning over with and for the afternoon to be here.
No matter how many times I’d washed and dried my hands, I couldn’t get them to stop sweating. At each stoplight on the way to the courthouse, I wiped my hands on my pants and then held them over the air vents. With my nerves as shot as they were, you’d think I was the one on trial.
As I walked toward the courthouse, James called.
“Hey,” I said. I’d worried he was going to tell me that something had come up and he wasn’t able to attend the hearing. I could even hear the worry in my voice.
“I’m running a bit behind with traffic. I’ll be there, but I’ll meet you inside.”
“Okay, see you soon.”
Once I’d made it through security, I found the courtroom and waited until ten minutes before the scheduled start time before I entered. Finding a seat wasn’t a problem. There were only three people sitting in the public section of the courtroom, and they were sitting behind Elise’s attorney. They wore business attire and sat a few feet apart from one another. Psychiatrists, I’d bet.
“Andrew,” Michael called my name as he stepped around the partition that separated the public and legal counsel. He shook my hand and jostled my shoulder. “Relax, it’ll be over very soon.”
I nodded. I looked in the direction of Elise’s attorney and couldn’t help but want to go over and slug him in the stomach for encouraging this to go on and on. But it was his job. He was probably just trying to make a living. Maybe he’d hated his job. It made me think about Tabitha and how she’d said she’d hated continually defending those rich kids in Denver.
“Will Elise be in here soon?” I asked.
“She will, yes. The psychiatrists will mainly handle the questions from the attorneys, but she will field some too.”
I nodded.
Why had I decided to attend?
“Excuse me, Andrew,” Michael said. He went back to the table he had been sitting at and began speaking with one of his colleagues.
