Chapter 23: The Stand

"Nine nights," I said into the phone.

"What?"

"I took one a night for nine nights. My doctor wrote fourteen. I couldn't sleep in the room where she died."

The gagging in the back seat had stopped.

Fergus's hand found my knee and stayed there.

"I believe you," my lawyer said. "Now the judge has to. Do you still have the bottle?"

I didn't.

I'd poured the last five down my mother's kitchen sink the morning after the funeral.

"Then bring yourself," he said. "That's better anyway."

August fourteenth was hot enough to soften the sidewalk outside Family Court.

I was twenty-nine weeks along, in a navy dress my landlady had let out at the seams.

Fergus wore a gray suit he'd bought for his sister's funeral.

It pulled across his shoulders every time he moved.

"Stop fixing my collar," he said.

"Stop breathing so hard in it."

"I'm a big man in a small suit, Doc. This is how I breathe."

My lawyer met us on the steps without his sunflower seeds.

"Court officer took them," he said darkly. "Like I'm smuggling."

Emerson was waiting in the hallway outside Courtroom 4.

He'd lost the gray look completely.

He'd also lost the expensive haircut, and he looked younger without it.

"I went to her house," he said, before I could ask. "The night you gave me the record."

"What did she say?"

"That she'd do it again." He looked at the courtroom door. "She said a Kenley who can't eat protein can't sell it. She said it like it was weather."

Fergus put a hand on his shoulder, briefly, and took it away.

The courtroom was smaller than I'd pictured.

Wood paneling, a flag, a ceiling fan turning too slowly to matter.

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