24. Chapter 24
Jade
The smell of coffee hits me at five-forty in the morning and my stomach turns over.
I am standing at the top of the stairs in my robe. Graham is in the kitchen. He has been up since four. I can hear the low rumble of him on the phone with Pierce.
The coffee smell rises up the stairwell like a wave.
I make it back to the bathroom in time. Quietly. I run the tap while it happens so he won't hear. I rinse my mouth. I brace my hands on the cold porcelain of the sink and breathe through it.
This is the third morning.
The first morning I told myself it was nerves. The second morning I told myself it was the flu. I drank ginger tea. I ate two crackers.
This is the third morning, and I have stopped lying to myself.
I straighten up. I look at my face in the mirror.
There is a faint blue cast under my eyes that has been there for a week.
My hair is heavier than usual. My breasts have been tender for four days, the kind of tenderness I have learned, over a lifetime of cycles, to recognize as one specific thing. And it is not my period coming.
I count back.
The wedding night. The desk. The pill case I left on the bathroom counter for three days before that and four days after. The slow drift I tracked in my phone since that morning by the birches and silenced every morning the alarm went off.
I have the math. I've had it for a week.
I open the cabinet under the sink.
The test is in the back, behind a box of tampons I bought before I needed to know better.
I bought it on Sunday at a pharmacy two towns over because in Linden Lake even the gum at the register has eyes.
It has been sitting in the cabinet for three days while I worked out whether I had the courage to look.
I take the box out. I read the instructions. I do what they say.
I set the test on the edge of the sink and sit on the closed lid of the toilet and look at my hands.
My hands are very steady.
They have not been steady once in two weeks. They shook at Crandall's walkthrough. They shook last night when I picked up the phone to call my mother and put it down again.
They are steady now.
I look at the second hand on my watch. I count down.
Two minutes.
I let myself, for those two minutes, think about what I already know.
I knew on Saturday morning. I woke up before Graham and lay in the dark and knew, before the body confirms it. A quietness in my chest that has nothing to do with calm. An awareness somewhere below my ribs that is not pain and not pressure and not anything I have ever felt before.
I knew on Sunday when the coffee turned on me for the first time.
I knew on Monday when I cried in the laundry room over a single sock of Iris's that did not have a match.
I have known for three days. I have not said it out loud, not even to myself, because saying it out loud makes it a thing I have to act on, and there is a courtroom waiting in three hours.
I cannot give him one more thing to carry. Not today.
The watch crosses two minutes.
I look.
Positive.
I already knew. But there is a difference between knowing and seeing, and seeing it makes my eyes go hot for a single second before I get hold of myself.
Four weeks since the wedding. The doctor will date it at six. I know the math. The body and the calendar count from different places.
I set the test back on the edge of the sink. I look at it for a long moment.
The weeks before the wedding were chaos. Iris's crises. The board prep. The hearing prep. The mornings my routine slipped by an hour, then two, then I lost the thread entirely and told myself I'd sort it out after the hearing. The pill case sat on the counter and watched me not take it.
I put my hand flat against my stomach.
It feels like a regular stomach. There is nothing to feel yet.
The whole thing is the size of a poppy seed, smaller than the smallest thing that has ever mattered this much.
I keep my hand there for a long moment anyway, because I want this small creature to know, on the morning that we are going into a courtroom to keep its sister, that I am already its mother.
That is not a thing I planned to think. It arrives anyway.
I wrap the test in a square of tissue. I tuck it in the back of the cabinet, behind the spare soap.
Not a secret. Not forever. Just mine, for today.
I could tell him in the car. I won't. I want him to walk into that room with everything he has.
I wash my hands. I check my face in the mirror.
I go downstairs.
The courthouse parking lot is full at eight-forty-five.
Two news vans. Martha's Gazette sedan in the front row. People who have nothing to do on a Wednesday standing in clusters near the entrance like they've been assigned positions.
Linden Lake has picked a side. I can feel it from inside the car.
"Don't look at the cameras," Pierce says from the back seat. "Walk straight. Don't take questions."
Graham's jaw is set. He already knows this.
He gets out and comes around to my door. His hand finds the small of my back the second I'm on the pavement, and I let it. Not for the cameras.
For the four of us. The three walking into that building and the one none of us can protect yet except by winning.
We walk Iris to the side entrance where Voss's man is waiting. She hugs Graham hard enough to hear. Then she turns and hugs me, her arms around my waist, her face pressed into my coat.
"You'll be there when I come out?"
"We'll be there."
She studies me like she's deciding whether to believe something. Then she transfers Justice and Judge to Voss's man with the gravity of a general handing off command, and she's gone.
Inside, the courtroom smells the same as it did yesterday. Floor wax. Old radiator steam. The coffee smell catches me wrong for a second. I breathe through my mouth until it passes.
The Whitlocks are already seated.
Beatrice is wearing pearls. Of course, she is. Arthur's tie is the color of a man trying to look like a grandfather in a room that is about to decide he isn't one.
I take my seat beside Graham. Pierce arranges his folders.
Halloway enters looking like a woman who did not sleep well.
Pierce leans toward Graham and says something low that makes Graham's shoulder drop by a fraction. Whatever Pierce saw in her face, it is good news.
We rise. We sit. The hearing resumes.
She does not waste time. She does not look at Beatrice.
"This court has spent the evening reviewing the materials introduced yesterday morning, including the sealed federal filing. I am prepared to rule on the pending motions before any further testimony is heard."
The Whitlocks' attorney rises halfway. Halloway looks at him. He sits back down.
"The motion to suppress the medical records and the private journal pages introduced yesterday is granted. Both items are stricken from the record. Counsel for the petitioners will not refer to them in any further proceeding before this court."
A small sound from Beatrice. Not a word.
"The motion to admit Exhibit M, the surveillance logbook, is granted. The motion to admit the sworn statement of Tiffany Marsh is granted. Both will be considered as part of the evidentiary record."
I watch Beatrice's hands.
Very still for most of the first hour. Folded. Composed. The hands of a woman who has sat in formal rooms before.
Then Pierce reads Exhibit M into the record. The surveillance logbook. The planned approach on my solo pharmacy trip. The trip when I was alone on that road.
Beatrice's hand moves.
Just once, a small shift on the table, and then it is still again. But Graham sees it. I watch his jaw ease by a single degree.
I look at Beatrice and I think about twenty-three times. I think about Iris on the dock asking if her daddy was going to go away like her mommy did. I think about the small girl who drew three people holding hands in the sun and called one of them Mama-Jade before anyone told her she could.
I keep my hands flat on the table. I don't let any of that show.
By ten-thirty, Arthur and Beatrice Whitlock have been named on the public record as subjects of an active federal investigation. By eleven, Beatrice's hand is shaking on Arthur's arm.
I let myself, for the first time, believe we are going to win.
Pierce stands for the last time before recess.
"Your Honor. With the court's permission, I'd like to call a brief character witness before the court hears closing arguments. Mrs. Sterling. Five minutes."
I don't hear the rest of the exchange between Pierce and Halloway.
My pulse is loud in my ears. I knew this was coming. He called yesterday and told me what he was going to ask. I said yes in under four seconds. Then I sat in the bathroom with the door locked for twenty minutes figuring out what I was actually going to say.
"Five minutes. Mrs. Sterling. The bench."
I stand.
I don't look at Graham. If I look at him, I will not be able to say any of it with my voice intact.
My legs are steady. I did not expect that. I walk to the witness box and take the chair. I am sworn in. I sit.
Pierce stands at the corner of the defense table. Relaxed. Unhurried.
"Mrs. Sterling. How long have you known my client?"
"Almost three months."
"In that time, what have you observed about his fitness as a father?"
I am quiet for a beat. The kind of beat that has nothing to do with not knowing the answer and everything to do with knowing too many of them.
I lean toward the microphone.
"The first time I saw him, he was standing outside his daughter's bathroom door, trying to apologize to her through the wood.
He had raised his voice. She had locked herself in.
He didn't pound on the door. He didn't threaten to call someone.
He stood there in his own house in a five-thousand-dollar suit and apologized to a six-year-old through a closed door, and he meant every word.
That was the first thing I learned about Graham Sterling.
He apologizes to his daughter. By name. Without an audience. "
The courtroom is very quiet.
I look at Graham.