Page 8 of Jury Woman, Part 4 of 6

"Be nice to Heidi," I said.

"Not gonna happen," they said in unison, and for once they sounded like allies.

"Bye, Mom."

Then the screen went blank.

I stayed in my chair longer than I should have. Lily's troubles I understood. Mean girls and a wandering boyfriend were practically a rite of passage.

But Josh had always been my easy one, the kid who did homework without being asked and apologized when he tracked mud across the floor. Josh didn't skip class. Josh didn't ride around with stoner seniors.

Except now, apparently, he did.

I thought of him on the bench at every game while his coach looked right past him, and of his father telling him he might as well quit.

A boy who believed nobody was paying attention would eventually go looking for someone who would.

October 8, Thursday

I'D CAST on the gloves again that morning with the same rose-colored yarn, still kinked from Monday's unraveling. Wool remembers. Every stitch I'd ripped out had left a little wave behind.

Today's witness was a computer forensics examiner from the GBI, a tall woman with close-cropped silver hair and a voice as even as a metronome. She'd spent six months with a laptop seized from Blackthorne's office, and she walked us through it folder by folder.

A spreadsheet titled Q3 Vendors, deleted and recovered. A column of initials. A column of dollar amounts. Beside one entry, the initials H.A. and a single word: resolved.

"What does the metadata tell you about when that notation was added?" the prosecutor asked.

"It was entered at 11:52 p.m. on the night of the shooting. Approximately two hours after Mr. Alvarez's death."

I stopped knitting and watched the defense table.

For weeks Blackthorne had sat like a man enduring a tedious board meeting. Today he couldn't settle. He shifted in his chair. He uncapped his pen and capped it again. He smoothed his tie, then his hair, then his tie once more. When the spreadsheet filled the screen, his jaw tightened and he leaned over to whisper to Bryan Stone, who waved him off without turning his head.

A man with nothing to hide didn't fidget like that. The thought arrived fully formed. He did it.

I made myself set it down, like a hot pan.

Innocent until proven guilty. The judge had said it the first day, and the second, and nearly every week since. Restlessness wasn't evidence. Maybe his back hurt. Maybe he hated seeing his private files projected ten feet high for strangers to pick through. I'd hate that, too. How a person looked didn't count. Only what the government could prove.

No matter how guilty he seemed.

I bent to my needles and discovered I'd been knitting where I should have purled. The ribbing had turned lumpy and unreadable, the pattern gone sideways three rounds back.

I almost laughed. Here it was, my relationship with my daughter, rendered in pink wool. I'd started with a pattern and the best intentions, and somewhere along the way I'd lost track of which stitch came next. Again. Now the whole thing was twisted, and tugging on it only made it worse.

Lily, upset over a boy walking the halls with another girl. Josh riding the bench at soccer games, told by his own father to give up. Warren ordering everyone to clean up, as if the house would put itself in order if he said it loudly enough.

And me, here, knitting gloves nobody had asked for.

"—consistent with a wiping program being run on the drive, but not completely."

My head jerked up. The screen showed something new, a list of file names I didn't recognize. The examiner was pointing to a date. The prosecutor was nodding as though something important had just been established, and I had no idea what it was.

Heat rushed to my face. How long had I been gone? Five minutes? Ten? The juror beside me hadn't taken her eyes off the screen, and I felt like a student who'd dozed through the one lecture that would be on the final.

I set the knitting in my lap, pressed my fingernails into my palms, and fixed my eyes on the witness.

Pay attention. A man's freedom depends on this.