August 27, Thursday
I'D CAST on the fourth blanket in a soft sage green, but three rows in I already knew something was off—the tension was too tight in places, too loose in others.
My hands, usually so reliable they could work without consulting the rest of me, kept betraying small errors this morning, and I suspected it had less to do with the yarn and more to do with what I'd carried into the courtroom with me after yesterday's call with Josh.
The witness on the stand was a woman named Renata Cole, and from the moment she settled into the chair, something in her stillness told me this testimony belonged to a different category than what had come before.
She sat with her hands folded tightly in her lap, and when the prosecutor asked her to state her relationship to the case, her voice wavered before steadying.
"I'm the widow of Horatio Alvarez."
Her words landed heavily in the room. I recalled from Detective Terry's testimony weeks ago, the unsolved case, the corroborated alibi that had let Blackthorne walk away from suspicion once already.
"Can you describe the last time you spoke with your husband?"
"He called me from the parking garage. Said he was five minutes from home, asked if I wanted him to pick up milk." Her voice thinned but didn't break. "That was the last thing my husband ever said to me. Milk."
I dropped a stitch. I felt it go, the small give of yarn slipping free of the needle, and for once I didn't reach immediately for the crochet hook, just let it sit there, unraveling a half-row while I listened.
The prosecutor walked her through the aftermath with obvious care—the knock at the door, the two detectives standing on her porch with mournful expressions, the eighteen months since spent raising two small children who still asked when their father was coming home from work.
"Did you know your husband had testified against an associate of the defendant's, prior to his death?"
"Not until after. He never told me. I think he didn't want me to worry."
Bryan Stone approached his cross-examination with visible caution, as though he understood that any misstep here would cost the defense.
"Mrs. Cole, I'm very sorry for your loss," he began, and I believed, watching him, that he actually was. "I have to ask—do you have any personal knowledge connecting my client directly to your husband's death?"
"No," she said. "I only know what the detectives told me. That he was the primary suspect. That the case never closed."
"And you're aware he was never charged."
"I'm aware." Something flat and furious moved behind her eyes. "I'm also aware my husband is still dead, and nobody's ever answered for it."
"I'm sorry for your loss, but I understand that you have remarried."
A murmur sounded in the gallery. I understood Stone's implication—how much could Renata be grieving if she'd remarried? When Mrs. Cole's chin went up, tears glittered in her eyes.
"I found love again, but I will love Horatio until the day I die."
My heart squeezed. Had I ever loved Warren that much?
Stone had no response that wouldn't have sounded monstrous, and he sat down without pursuing it further.
I fixed the dropped stitch during the recess that followed, working the hook carefully back through the gap, restoring the row to something resembling order, though the tension through that section remained visibly different from the rows before and after it—tighter, somehow, a small permanent record of the ten minutes during which my attention had entirely left the yarn in my lap.
By the time court adjourned, I'd finished barely four rows of sage green, and every one of them, I suspected, would carry some faint evidence of Renata Cole's voice describing a conversation about milk.