Chapter 21: Plea

"Go ahead," I said. "Swear to it."

Then I hung up on her.

Nolan had heard every word.

"She's going to lie under oath," he said.

"She's going to try."

"What was she like? Before all this?"

"She held my hand at my grandmother's funeral," I said. "She'd already been sleeping with him for a week."

"I'm coming," he said.

"You don't have to."

"I was there that morning," he said. "Room 204. I'm the one who took your phone."

The courthouse in Dayton was two streets from the bank where all of this started.

There were maybe twenty people in the benches.

A few of Ryan's gym friends, in the back, not sitting together.

A reporter from the local paper with a notebook on her knee.

The woman whose granddaughter had almost bought the silver hatchback.

Ryan sat at the defense table in the same bad suit, next to a young public defender.

He turned around when I walked in.

He smiled, the commercial smile, and mouthed, "Hi, babe."

The prosecutor was a brisk woman in her fifties.

She leaned over as I sat down behind her.

"His lawyer says he's going to fight it," she said. "Because of the friend."

"I know."

"Is there anything else I should know about the friend?"

I leaned forward and told her one thing.

She wrote it down and underlined it twice.

Kendall was the first witness Ryan's side called.

She came up the aisle in a navy dress with a white collar.

No lashes. Pearl earrings.

She put her hand on the Bible and swore to tell the truth.

The public defender asked her what happened on the morning of September fifth, last year.

"Ryan called me from a rest stop," she said. "He was going to see Linds in Boston."

"He said Linds wanted him to get a card in her name. He had me on speaker."

"Then Linds called him on the other line, and he merged us in."

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