Page 5 of Jury Woman, Part 4 of 6

He grunted, which could have meant anything, and then the screen went blank.

I sat looking at the empty box where my children had been. When I stood Deputy Wells opened the door and followed me down the hall.

He didn't need to say anything. My own thoughts were loud enough.

Was I asking too much of them? Of all of us?

Then I thought of Yolanda, Xavier, Carol, Dwayne, and the rest. Almost every juror had left somebody behind. Why should my family be the exception?

And weren't Lily and Josh strong enough to weather a few months without me?

I unlocked my door and stepped inside, said goodbye to Deputy Wells. I closed the door and leaned against it, once again feeling torn. I'd have to trust my kids. And trust that I'd instilled something good in them along the way.

October 5, Monday

THE YARN was a pale, rosy pink, soft as a bunny. I'd been saving it for a special project and since Lily was uppermost on my mind, I decided to make her fingerless gloves and a headband. She was forever complaining that her hands froze in some of the classrooms but refused to wear real gloves because she couldn't text in them. These would be my peace offering, even if she never admitted to wearing them.

I'd worked the ribbed cuffs over the weekend. This morning I started the thumb gusset, which meant increasing every third round, counting constantly, and paying attention.

Week nine of the government's case had turned the courtroom into a technology seminar. An FBI cell phone analyst, a slight man with rimless glasses and a laser pointer, stood beside a map of metro Atlanta sprinkled with colored dots.

"Each dot represents a phone connecting to a tower," he explained. "Blue is the phone the government attributes to Mr. Blackthorne's driver. Red belongs to the shooter."

For forty minutes he walked us through the evening Horatio Alvarez died. Blue and red dots converged on the same stretch of Peachtree, then the same parking garage, then scattered in opposite directions eleven minutes later. After the map came license plate reader hits, then an encrypted message recovered from a deleted app, shown on the screen in stark black letters:

Package delivered. Boss is happy.

A murmur rippled through the gallery. I increased two stitches and glanced toward the defense table.

Robert Blackthorne was looking at me.

He'd stared at jurors since the first day, sweeping the box with an appraising eye. But this was different. His gaze had stopped traveling along the row. It rested on me and stayed.

I dropped my eyes to my needles. When I looked up a full minute later, he was still watching, chin propped on steepled fingers, his expression mild, interested, almost pleasant. That was what chilled me.

I shouldn't have held his gaze, but I couldn't seem to help it.

Does he know my name?

Lily's post. Fourteen hundred followers, twenty-nine screenshots. The judge had said it was contained. Detective Terry had said so, too, and Deputy Wells had checked every lock on my house. But a screenshot could travel anywhere. Somewhere, someone on Blackthorne's payroll could have zoomed in on my daughter's selfie and thought, there she is.

My mouth went dry. I reached for my water cup and found it empty.

When I looked back at my work, I'd knit straight through an increase round. I tinked back, lost count, then realized I'd purled a whole section that should have been knit.

I lifted my eyes to the back wall. Deputy Wells was watching me, too. He tipped his head a fraction, eyebrows drawing together. Everything all right?

I looked back to the defense table. Blackthorne had turned to murmur something in Bryan Stone's ear, his attention fixed on the analyst's next map.

Not on me. Maybe never on me.

You're seeing things, I told myself. A week of bad sleep and a guilty conscience, and now you think a mob boss is memorizing your face.

I gave Wells the smallest shake of my head and went back to my gloves.

It didn't help. I miscounted the gusset again. I dropped a stitch, chased it down four rows with my crochet hook, and discovered I'd twisted it on the way back up. By the time the analyst began explaining how deleted data survives in a phone's memory, the glove looked like a nervous beginner's first attempt.

So I did what my mother taught me to do when a piece goes wrong beyond saving. I slid the needles free and pulled the working yarn. Round after round of pink loosened into crimped strands and piled in my lap, a weekend's worth of work gone in under a minute.