He Let Our Baby Die Over a Hospital Bill novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: Plea

I stood on the sidewalk under the backward Ns for a long time.

Inside, somebody was laughing. Abe was scraping the last of the chile out of the pot.

"Nadine? Are you there?"

"I'm here."

"You don't have to answer tonight."

"I can answer now," I said. "He can see me in the courtroom. With everyone else."

On the morning of the thirteenth of May, I put on a navy dress my mother had sent up from Pueblo.

Abe drove me downtown in the green truck. He'd ironed his white shirt. It still didn't fit.

"I'll be in the hall," he said, at the courtroom door.

"You can come in."

"I know. I'm going to be in the hall. Where you can find me."

The courtroom was bigger than the one where they'd sealed the recording.

It was full.

The reporter was in the second row. Behind her, people with notebooks and phones held in their laps.

Gina sat beside me with her hand clamped on my knee.

The four women sat in a row behind us. The Lakewood mother had brought a pack of tissues for everybody.

Marla sat alone on the other side of the aisle.

She'd gotten thin. She didn't look at me, and I didn't make her.

They brought Holden in through a side door.

He wasn't in handcuffs. He was in a gray suit that hung on him, with no watch.

No quarter-zip. No little microphone along his jaw.

He looked at the gallery the way he'd always looked at a room before a pitch.

There was nobody in it to pitch.

The judge was a heavy, tired man with reading glasses on his head.

He asked Holden if he understood the charge.

"Yes, Your Honor."

He asked how he pleaded.

There was a pause, long enough that Gina's nails went into my knee.

"Guilty."

The judge asked him to say, in his own words, what he had done.

Holden looked at the paper his lawyer had put in front of him.

Then he put it down.

"On May fourteenth, at 6:08 p.m., I called 911 and canceled the ambulance the midwife had called for my wife," he said. "She was in labor. I knew it was an emergency. I canceled it to avoid the cost."

His voice was very calm.

It was the first true thing I'd ever heard it say without a number after it.

"The court will hear from the victim's family," the judge said.

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