Page 20 of Jury Woman, Part 4 of 6

Testimony works the same way. You learn to feel when a witness's rhythm changes.

And you learn, above all, to catch mistakes. Early on, every knitter has the horrible experience of discovering an error twelve rows down, a stitch that slipped off the needle and has been quietly unraveling a little ladder through the work ever since. After that, you check. Constantly. You count at the end of every row. You thread a lifeline, a strand of contrasting yarn, through a row you know is correct, so if disaster strikes, you only have to rip back that far.

So when Agent Reyes pointed to a yellow flag in April and described a call from Blackthorne's personal cell to Marcus Dellano, my needles stopped.

I flipped back through my notebook. There. October ninth, the digital forensics agent. He'd testified that Blackthorne's personal phone had been off the network for eleven days that April, during a trip to the Bahamas.

I wrote the two dates side by side and drew a box around them.

Maybe there was an explanation. A second phone, a mistake in the exhibit. It might mean nothing at all. But it was a stitch that didn't match its neighbors.

Twenty minutes later, Bryan Stone rose for cross-examination, carrying a single sheet of paper. His first question was about April.

I felt a small, fierce glow of vindication.

I wasn't a lawyer. I'd never taken a single law class. But I'd spent half my life keeping a hundred small details from sliding off the needle while everyone around me assumed nothing was happening at all.

I finished the row and turned the work. Eight rows until the next cable cross.

I knew exactly where I was.

October 21, Wednesday

LILY WAS alone again, curled into the corner of the window seat in the living room with a throw pillow hugged against her stomach. Her face looked scrubbed and pale, but her eyes were bright. Brighter than I'd seen them since before the dance.

"Hi, sweetheart. Is Josh around?"

"Nope." She drew the word out. "Josh is kind of... not allowed to be around anywhere right now."

Something in her voice made the back of my neck prickle. "What does that mean?"

She glanced toward the hallway, then leaned in close to the camera. "He punched Scott."

"He what?"

"Yesterday, before first period. Right in front of the trophy case." She said it the way she used to announce that she'd made the honor roll. "Scott was standing there with Ariana and a bunch of the lacrosse guys, laughing about something, and Josh just walked right up and hit him. One punch. Scott's nose bled all over his shirt."

I pressed my hand against my mouth.

Josh. My Josh. The boy who used to carry spiders outside in a paper cup so nobody would squish them. Who cried at the end of every dog movie ever made, including the ones where the dog lived.

"Is Scott okay?"

"He's fine. It's not broken or anything. But the school has a zero-tolerance policy for fighting, and Josh already had the skipping thing on his record. So they expelled him."

"Expelled?" The word came out louder than I meant it to. Near the door, Deputy Wells's head turned slightly. "Not suspended? Expelled?"

"Mr. Garber said there'll be a hearing. But for now, yeah. He can't go back." She shrugged, as if expulsion were a scheduling inconvenience. "He's in his room. Dad took his phone."

"Where's your father?"

"At Scott's parents' house." Her mouth flattened. "They're talking about pressing charges. Assault, or battery, or whatever. Dad went over there to try to talk them out of it."

I couldn't feel my fingers. I looked down and found them knotted together in my lap, the knuckles white.

Charges. A police report with my son's name on it. A juvenile record following him into every college application, every job interview, for years to come. I'd spent the past two weeks sitting in a federal courtroom listening to what happens when violence becomes a habit, and now my baby had thrown a punch in a school hallway.

"Lily, this is serious. This is so serious."