Reborn: I Let My Mother Suffer the Price of Her Favoritism novel · Chapter 24 of 32
Chapter 24: Day One
The trial opened on a gray Monday, six weeks after the hearing, in a courtroom that smelled of wet wool.
The jury of twelve filed in and sat down.
Seven women, five men, and not one of them looked at my mother.
She wore the navy suit again and her pearls.
The sling was gone, and the ankle monitor showed above her loafer, and she folded her hands on the table.
Sloane sat three rows behind her, at the end of the aisle, with an aide from the clinic.
She had no lawyer.
She had refused every one the court offered her.
Dale sat on my side of the room, alone on a bench at the back, with his black ledger in a paper bag at his feet.
The prosecutor's opening took nine minutes.
She did not raise her voice, and she did not once say the word evil.
"This is a story about a tea," she said. "And about a woman who stood in a door every night for twelve years and watched her adopted daughter drink it."
The defense lawyer's opening took twenty.
He talked about a widowed mother and a sick girl, and a daughter who had set a trap, and the word he used most was devoted.
Then the prosecutor stood and said, "The State calls its first witness."
The housekeeper rose from the bench beside me.
She smoothed her church coat, and she carried her handbag to the stand in both hands.
She took the oath in a clear voice.
She told the court that she had worked in the Haldane house for twelve years.
She told them about the tea, and the locked drawer, and the Easter on the stairs.
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