The Night I Stopped Waiting for My Husband novel · Chapter 17 of 24
Chapter 17: The Respondent's Table
The hearing was set for the first Thursday of December, in a courtroom with oak benches and a gallery full of strangers.
Harrison sat on my left at the respondent's table, because I had told him he could.
Margaret sat behind us with Ada asleep in her sling, and a court officer had already looked twice at the baby and decided not to say anything.
Across the aisle, Constance wore pearl grey and her best smile.
Rosalind sat beside her in black, out of the hospital for two weeks and pale as paper.
I had not looked at her once, and I did not plan to.
"Counsel," said the judge, a heavy man with a patient face. "Open for the petitioner."
Constance's lawyer stood up and buttoned his jacket.
"The family does not wish to take a child from a mother, Your Honor," he said. "It wishes only to see that the child is safe."
"Mrs. Merrick has watched a young woman in medical crisis, living in an attic with a friend, with no income of her own, and at thirty-one weeks she stood up in front of two hundred donors."
"She has, by her own account, been waiting for her husband for five years and has now stopped."
"The family's concern is stability."
He held up a single sheet.
"The family also offered, the day she left the hospital, a private clinic, a nurse and a driver. She refused."
"I did," I said under my breath.
"Mrs. Merrick's offer was a generous one," the lawyer went on. "She asks the court to consider why a mother would refuse."
My own lawyer touched my wrist.
She was a calm woman in a brown suit whom Margaret had found in two days, and she had told me on the courthouse steps that the only thing that wins is the plain fact.
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