46. Eli
ELI
The courtroom smells like old paper and floor polish, and I’ve counted the ceiling tiles above the prosecution table eleven times since the jury filed out.
Dakota sits between Cruz and me on the hard wooden bench. Her hand is in mine, her other locked around Cruz’s forearm. Brady and Dante flank us like bookends. Nobody in this room could look at the five of us and mistake what we are, and for the first time in my life, I don’t care.
Brady testified two days ago. Sat in the witness box with the scar on his shoulder still pink under his collar and described the knife, the break-in, the sound Gerald made when Dakota put him down.
His voice never wavered. Afterward, in the hallway, he shook so hard I had to hold his coffee for him.
Dakota testified yesterday. Three hours. She said words in front of strangers that took her months to say to us. Fourteen years old. Her mother in the next room. The lock on her door that Gerald removed and never replaced.
She didn’t cry on the stand. She cried last night, in the dark, with four sets of hands on her, and this morning she put on the gray blazer Dante pressed for her and said, “Let’s finish this.”
The door beside the judge’s bench opens. The jury files in.
Dakota’s grip tightens. I feel her pulse through her palm, quick and hard, a fighter’s heartbeat before the bell.
“Whatever happens,” I murmur, “we walk out of here together.”
“I know, Daddy.” Barely a whisper. Just for me.
The foreman stands. A woman in her sixties with reading glasses pushed up into silver hair. She unfolds the paper.
“On the count of burglary in the first degree, we find the defendant guilty.”
Dakota’s breath catches.
“On the count of attempted malicious wounding, guilty. On the count of aggravated sexual battery of a minor, guilty. On the count of…”
Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
The word lands seven times, and each one drives Gerald Fitch lower in his chair at the defense table, his shoulders caving like a building coming down floor by floor.
The sentencing takes twenty more minutes. The judge, a broad-faced man who watched Dakota’s whole testimony without blinking, leans into his microphone.
“Thirty years. No possibility of parole.”
Dakota doesn’t move. Doesn’t breathe. Then Cruz’s arm comes around her, and Brady reaches across Dante to grab her knee, and the sound she makes isn’t crying and isn’t laughing—it’s both, torn out of her at once, fifteen years of held breath leaving her body in a single ragged rush.
Gerald turns as the bailiffs cuff him. His eyes find her. Whatever he’s looking for—fear, guilt, the girl he used to own—it isn’t there anymore. Dakota looks back at him the way she looks at an opponent after the ref raises her hand.
He looks away first.