Chapter 21: Brogan's POV: The Hearing

Brogan's POV

The hearing was set for ten on a Thursday, in a courtroom on the fourth floor of the Daley Center.

Every seat was taken by nine o'clock.

Reporters filled the back three rows, and a line of people who had read the story online stood in the corridor.

Imogen sat beside me in the front row, eight months pregnant, in the green silk she had paid the tailor for with her own first money.

She held my hand on her knee and looked straight ahead.

"If she looks at you," I said, "you don't have to look back."

"I'm going to look back," Imogen said.

Vera came in between two deputies, in a grey suit with no pearls.

A monitor on her ankle showed under her trouser hem.

She saw us at once.

Her eyes went to Imogen's stomach, then to my face, and she lifted her chin.

Her lawyer, a tall man with a careful voice, rose and said that the state's case rested on the word of a driver who had been paid.

"Paid by my client," he said, "if the court believes him, which it should not."

The judge, a woman with reading glasses and a patient mouth, said, "Call him."

The driver took the stand in a borrowed brown suit.

He did not look at Vera once.

He told it plainly: the call at twenty past six, the mud on the plate, the word frighten.

Then he told about the forty thousand dollars in the Foundation envelope.

"And you kept the voicemail," the prosecutor said.

"I did, ma'am. I'm not a clever man. I thought one day I might need it."

The prosecutor played it.

The courtroom was so quiet that I heard a pen click in the press row.

Vera's voice came out of the speaker, calm and clipped.

"She will cross at the corner. Frighten her until she does not get up."

Nobody said a word.

Imogen's hand went rigid in mine, and I turned my palm and held her harder.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Divorced, Now Watch Me Rise from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.