He Defended Her, He Said I Deserved It novel · Chapter 21 of 32
Chapter 21: Sunday Paper
I sat up under the quilt.
"Why are you calling me?"
"Because you're the only one who'd know what it looks like."
I didn't answer.
"Do you remember my first trial?" he said. "You were in the second row on the left. You had chalk on your chin. I looked for you every time I stood up."
"I remember."
"I looked for you at every trial after that. Thirty-one of them. You were always there." He laughed, and it cracked in the middle. "Who's going to draw me now, Lainie?"
I thought about the kid with the sandbag hands.
I thought about eight women on my floor, all with the same face.
"Nobody," I said. "Go home, Brantley."
I hung up and turned the phone face down on the floorboards.
Downstairs, through the floor, I heard Ike's radio go off.
He'd been awake too.
On Monday I put on my peacoat and took the eight new drawings downtown to the newspaper.
The editor was a big gray woman with a pencil behind each ear.
She'd bought my drawings for nine years. Murder trials. A governor's corruption case. A mayor who cried.
She'd never once asked me to sit down.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of He Defended Her, He Said I Deserved It are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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