Chapter 1
Closing Argument
At Piedmont State, the mock courtroom on the third floor of Haver Hall smelled of toner and the sweet gum that Ms. Fairchild chewed when she was timing you.
"Closing," said Ms. Fairchild. "Five minutes. State versus Whitlow. Go."
Corinne Bellamy stood at the little oak lectern with her notes in one hand. Across the room, three classmates sat in the jury box with the bored faces of people who had been told to be a jury. A boy in a borrowed tie played the defendant. A girl with a ponytail played the judge and kept looking at her phone.
She put the notes down. You were not allowed to look at your notes. You looked at the jury.
"Members of the jury," she said. "The State will tell you that this was a simple case. I'm going to ask you to remember that simple is what people call a thing when they have stopped looking."
Her voice was low and steady. She talked, and the room stopped being a classroom and became, for four minutes and some seconds, the only place in the world where she knew exactly what she was for.
She counted as she spoke. She had done it all her life, and nobody had ever commented on it, because it looked like concentration. Four syllables, a breath. Two. Three. If there were more than eleven in a row, she lost her place.
"Time," said Ms. Fairchild.
Corinne stopped. There was always a moment after a closing when the room came back, with its humming lights and somebody's cough and the traffic on Route 9 going by outside, and for the length of that moment she felt as if she had been holding her breath underwater and had been allowed up.
"Four-fifty," said Ms. Fairchild, looking at her clipboard. "Ninety-one on the rubric. Bellamy, you are very close."
"It's ninety-one percent of nothing if I don't hit the scholarship line."
"It's ninety-one percent of a woman who will be standing in a real courtroom by thirty." Ms. Fairchild shifted her gum to the other cheek. She was sixty and short and had been a public defender for twenty-six years, and had tried more cases than most of the judges she had appeared in front of. "You're rushing. You're so afraid of missing a point that you won't let the jury breathe."
"You can't leave out a point."
"You don't argue the silence. You use it. There's a difference." She tapped the clipboard. "You think the law is everything that happened. It isn't. It's everything somebody can prove, and I'll tell you now, honey, that is a lot smaller."
Corinne wrote that down on her wrist, in pen, in tiny block letters, because she was the kind of person who wrote things on her wrist.
She was twenty-three. She was five feet six, with her mother's long wrists and her father's eyebrows, which had a way of meeting in the middle when she was trying not to say something. She had brown hair that she usually wore up in a clip, a small silver stud in her left nostril that her mother pretended not to see, and a way of standing very still when she was listening that made strangers think she was shy and friends think she was judging them.
She was neither. She was counting.
She had moved into the house on Dellwood Street in January, with Ada Obi, who was studying to be a nurse and slept in her scrubs. It was a rented one-story with a carport and a front yard the size of a tablecloth, and it had, directly outside her bedroom window, a streetlight that the city had been told about four times and had not fixed. It blinked. Not quickly. About once every nine seconds, a long amber stutter, as if it were trying to remember a word. For the first month it had kept her awake. By March she had stopped noticing, and by May, if she was honest, she had started to need it. A room that blinked at her was a room that was being watched over.
She did not say that to Ada.
"You have to eat something," said Ada, now, from the kitchen table.
It was Friday, ten past five. Corinne had come home by the long way, along the river, because she wanted to hear what she'd said to herself on the walk. Ada was in her scrubs, with her hair under a purple cap, eating cereal out of a mixing bowl with a serving spoon.
"I ate."
"A banana is not food. A banana is a snack for a monkey." Ada pushed the box across the table. "How was the closing?"
"Ninety-one."
"That's amazing."
"It's not ninety-five."
"Corrie, you are the only person I know who gets a ninety-one and goes home to hate herself." Ada put down the spoon. "I'm serious. You study the way other people drive in the rain."
Corinne laughed. It came out smaller than she meant. Ada looked at her with the careful, level look she had learned somewhere in the first semester of nursing school, and which she used on patients and sometimes on her roommate.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"That's your face for something."
"It's my face for Mom's on shifts all weekend and Wes isn't picking up," said Corinne. "It's nothing."
Ruth Bellamy worked nights in the emergency room at Pruitt County Memorial, four on, three off, and in the last month had taken extra to cover for a nurse out on maternity leave. Corinne's brother Wes was twenty-seven and repaired transmissions at Haskell's Auto on the south side and had been known to turn off his phone for days, not out of unkindness but because the phone was one more thing that wanted something. They were a family that loved each other in the particular way of people who have been through something together and have never agreed on what to call it.
It had been seven years since her father died. They did not talk about that, either.
Her phone buzzed at six. It was a text from a number she had saved as CALEB (BAR).
u coming tmrw?? grant's thing at the lake. its gonna be dumb but there will be food
She looked at it for a moment.
She had dated Caleb Moss for four months in the spring of 2017, a long time ago, when she had still thought of herself as someone who might do that sort of thing. He had been twenty-six, with a beard he was always going to shave and a way of apologizing that was a little too practised. He worked behind the bar at the Hollow Log, which was owned by Owen Maddox's father. She had liked him because he asked her questions and then waited for the answers, and she had stopped seeing him because on the day she told him about the hospital, he had said, kindly, you don't have to tell me that, and she had understood that he had meant please don't.
They had stayed friends, in the way people do when neither of them has anything left to prove.
Who's Grant? she typed, though she knew.
pruitt. the lake house. everyone from high school will be there lol. ada can come
Ada's on shift.
u can come alone. ill be there. ill drive u home if u want
She turned the phone over on the table. In the next room, Ada was singing along with the radio, off-key, a country song about a truck.
Corinne had been to Grant Pruitt's house twice. It was a big cedar-and-glass place on the north shore of Lake Alder, with a dock and a boathouse and a long lawn that sloped to the water, and each time she'd gone, she had stood in the kitchen holding a plastic cup and thought about leaving. The Pruitts were that kind of family. They did not make you feel unwelcome. They made you feel observed.
She had no reason to go. She had a moot-court brief due on Monday, and nothing in her life at the moment that required a party.
But it was the last weekend before summer break, and in September she would start at the law school in Macon, and after that there would be courtrooms and other people's worst days to stand up in, and she thought, with a small, stubborn clarity: I should be a person who goes to things.
The streetlight blinked outside the window. Amber. One, two, three.
Maybe, she typed. What time?
She would think about that later. She would think about it for years, with a patient, scientific horror, the way you examine a photograph for the one thing out of place. She would go back to this evening, in the kitchen, with the box of cereal between them and the radio on, and ask what she might have said to herself, if she could have said anything.
She would find nothing.
That was what stayed with her, in the end, when everything else had been taken apart and put on a table and held up for inspection by people in suits. It was not that there had been a sign she had missed. There had been no sign. There had been a Friday, and cereal, and a phone that buzzed, and a girl who wanted to be somebody who went to things.
Ada picked up the serving spoon.
"Okay," she said. "If you go, text me. Every hour. I'm serious."
"I'll text you."
"And don't drink anything you didn't open."
"Ada."
"I'm just saying. I read the pamphlets."
"I know you did."
"Then humour me."
"Fine," said Corinne. "Every hour. I promise."
She meant it.
She did not know yet that there would be a single hour in which she could not keep it.