Page 9 of Jury Woman, Part 4 of 6

So do your children, the other half of my brain answered.

For the rest of the afternoon the two voices argued, while the examiner described recovered emails and timestamps, and the yarn lay idle on my lap.

October 9, Friday

I LEFT the knitting bag in my room that morning. My hands would only have tangled the yarn again, and I needed every scrap of my attention for the courtroom.

The witness was a digital forensics agent from the FBI's Atlanta field office, a compact man with a buzz cut who clasped his hands behind his back while he talked, like a soldier at parade rest. He'd extracted the contents of a phone recovered from the car of Blackthorne's driver, and the prosecutor warned us, gently, that some of what we were about to see might be difficult.

The first photograph showed a white two-story house with black shutters and a basketball hoop over the garage. The second showed the same house at night, one upstairs window glowing yellow. The third was a woman in a blue fleece jacket buckling a toddler into a car seat.

"Who is that?" the prosecutor asked.

"Mr. Alvarez's wife," the agent said. "And his younger son."

There were forty-one photographs, taken over nineteen days. The house at dawn. The house at dusk. Mrs. Alvarez in a grocery store, reaching for a carton of eggs. A boy of nine or ten in a red soccer jersey, racing across a field with his arms flung wide after a goal.

My stomach turned over.

"Were these photographs sent to anyone?"

"Several were forwarded to a second number, with an accompanying message."

The screen changed. He knows we know where they live. Tell him this is the last conversation.

Nobody in the courtroom made a sound. Even the reporters in the back row had stopped writing.

I stared at the boy in the red jersey, frozen mid-celebration, with no idea someone was watching from a parked car. He could've been Josh. A few years ago he was Josh, tearing down the sideline at the rec field after his first goal. I'd stood on the far side of that field snapping pictures of my own.

I stole a glance at Blackthorne. The fidgeting was gone. He sat motionless, eyes on the screen, wearing an expression close to boredom. As if forty-one photographs of a family who'd done nothing wrong were so much paperwork.

That frightened me more than anything the agent had said.

My fingers, I realized, were gripping the edge of the jury box railing. I let go and flexed them in my lap.

My whole life, the worst thing that happened on an ordinary Tuesday was a flat tire or a call from the school nurse. I knew terrible things happened. I watched the news. But I'd always believed they happened somewhere else, to people who'd made choices I would never make.

Horatio Alvarez's family had a basketball hoop and a boy who played soccer. His wife bought eggs.

I didn't want to know that someone could stand in a grocery aisle, photograph a mother choosing groceries, and send the picture to a man as a threat. I didn't want to know how ordinary evil could look, how patient it could be, how it could sit twenty feet away looking bored.

But now I did know. And there was no unraveling it the way I'd unraveled Lily's gloves.

When the judge called the lunch recess, I stood with the others and filed toward the jury room on unsteady legs.

Deputy Wells fell into step behind me, and I was grateful for him in a way I hadn't been before. For the first time since July, I understood exactly why he was there.

October 10, Saturday

WARREN WAS alone on the screen, which should have been a relief. He sat at the dining room table holding a coffee mug and wearing a wrinkled shirt. On the cabinet behind him I could see a stack of unopened mail, takeout containers, and a lone sneaker.

"Where's Heidi?" I asked.

"Spa day." He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. "Don't start."

I hadn't planned to—I'd planned to start somewhere else entirely.

"Did you know Josh skipped class on Tuesday? He went to the mall with a couple of seniors."