Page 25 of Jury Woman, Part 4 of 6

She narrowed her eyes. "Are you enjoying all that alone time?"

"Some," I admitted. "Mostly I've been writing. The therapist the court assigned asked me a question a few weeks ago, and I've been journaling about it ever since. Why I never ask for what I want."

Elaine stopped chewing.

"I'm learning things about myself I'd have preferred not to know," I went on. "But it helps. It's like finally turning on the overhead light after feeling my way around in the dark for twenty years."

She was quiet for a moment. Then, in a voice smaller than I'd heard from her since we were girls: "Maybe I should try that."

"You?"

"The promotion." She shrugged, eyes on the popcorn. "I thought I'd be over the moon. Regional VP, corner office, the whole thing. And it's fine. It's great. I just thought it would feel like... more."

I studied my little sister, the one who'd always been the success, the one who never seemed to need anything from anyone. Especially not from me.

"Do it," I said. "Buy a notebook. Write one question at the top of the page. Then be braver than you want to be when you answer it."

She laughed, but she didn't brush me off. "Look at you. Giving me career advice."

"Get used to it," I said.

October 26, Monday

WEEK TWELVE began with a cardboard box.

It sat on the evidence cart beside the witness stand, brown and ordinary, sealed with red tape stamped EVIDENCE over and over like a warning label. The witness was a property technician from the Atlanta Police Department, a slight woman with thick glasses and a laminated binder she held against her chest like a hymnal. She'd spent twenty-two years logging items into a warehouse, she told us. Her name was Dorian Probst.

It should have been the dullest testimony of the entire trial. McDavid had warned us at the start of the day. The government is nearing the end of its case. This week you'll hear from witnesses who account for how the evidence was handled. Signatures. Dates. Barcodes.

I'd brought Lily's headband, only a few inches from finished, and expected to knit straight through it.

Instead, I didn't knit a single stitch all morning.

"Ms. Probst," McDavid said, "please identify Government Exhibit 214."

She pulled on a pair of blue nitrile gloves, snapping each cuff at the wrist. She slit the red tape with a small blade. From inside the box, she lifted a clear plastic bag. Inside the bag lay a black handgun, its slide locked open, a yellow zip tie threaded through the empty chamber.

The courtroom changed. I don't know how else to describe it. Air stopped moving.

"This is a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol recovered from a storm drain on Peachtree Industrial Boulevard," she said. "I received it into property on April twenty-ninth of last year."

The gun from the garage. Level three. The one the ballistics expert had matched to the casings back in September.

McDavid walked Ms. Probst through every hand that had touched it. The detective who pulled it from the drain. The crime lab. The ballistics unit. Back to property. Out to the FBI. Back again. Every transfer written in a log, every signature initialed, every seal intact.

Then McDavid turned to the bench. "Your Honor, the government asks permission to publish Exhibit 214 to the jury."

Judge Arnold nodded.

I hadn't known that could happen. That we would hold it.

The bag started at juror one and moved down the front row, passed from hand to hand. Nobody spoke. The retired teacher held it by the corners, at arm's length, the way you'd carry something dead out of a garage. Yolanda barely let it rest on her palms before handing it to me.

It was heavier than I expected. Heavy and cold through the plastic, solid in a way nothing that small should be. Someone had wrapped a hand around this grip and squeezed, and a man had fallen, and his wife was sitting thirty feet away watching a woman in a cardigan hold it in her lap.

I didn't look at Renata Cole. I couldn't.

My hands had begun to tremble. I passed the bag to Dwayne before anyone could notice.