Karen’s hair was carefully curled into the kind of effort you make when you want to appear respectable to a stranger in authority. Kevin wore a suit that tried to look expensive and didn’t quite manage it, the shoulders slightly off, the tie too shiny under the fluorescent lights. Their attorney kept tapping a pen against his legal pad with the particular confidence of a man who has not yet understood that the courthouse is not his advantage.
Courtroom 23B had been mine for six years. I knew every scuff in the wood, every hairline crack in the tile near the jury box. It smelled the way all old courtrooms smell: paper and floor polish and the faint metallic trace of elevator air. It was where I had learned that silence, held correctly, is more powerful than anything you can say into it.
Kevin and Karen believed the silence belonged to them today. They’d brought their version of a story into my room and they were waiting for a stranger in black robes to hear it.
They were wrong about the stranger part.
The bailiff stepped forward. “All rise. Court is now in session for the Honorable Judge Samantha Hart.”
Kevin and Karen stood automatically, still smiling, still watching the side door where they expected someone to emerge. Their attorney rose with practiced ease, already composing his opening posture.
