She Cried. They Buried Me. I Came Back. novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Number One-Eleven

Hallie's POV

Joan left for her night shift at three, with her keys in one hand and my face in the other.

"Whatever you tell him," she said, "tell him all of it."

Then she was gone, and I sat on the stool by the stove and waited for the truck.

He came in at dusk with snow on his shoulders and put his phone on the workbench.

"Look," he said.

Six photographs, and I did not need to swipe through them twice.

"My lawyer wants them by Monday," he said. "She says they're enough." He sat down on the mattress, across from me, with the stove between us.

"Then it's done?"

"Not the part I came for." His voice was rough. "Hallie. "Sabrina said a thing on that dock, and I need it from you, not from her. Rule two. No lies."

So I told him.

I told him the staircase, the twelve jurors and the cell.

I told him how it ended, in a bed by a window.

I said it all in a flat voice.

If I let it be anything else, I would not get to the end.

He did not interrupt me once.

When I stopped, the stove ticked, and the dark had come down over the lake.

"You stood at the back of the courtroom," I said. "All three days."

"Hallie."

"You didn't say a word to me, Jerome. Not in the hall, not in the lot."

I made myself say the rest.

"I thought you'd come to watch me go down and let it happen."

His whole face changed.

"I don't remember it," he said. "In this life I have never stood in that courtroom."

He looked at me.

"But I know what I would have done."

"What?"

"Nothing you could see." He rubbed his jaw.

"Dirk's lawyer would have told me in a hallway to keep away from you. If I spoke to you, they'd call me to the stand."

"You could have sat beside me."

"I couldn't. They'd have used it against you." He looked at his hands.

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