Chapter 25: Exhibit M

The hearing was open to the public, and the public came.

Every bench in Courtroom 14 was full by eight in the morning.

The league sent a woman in a gray suit with a notebook, and she took the front row.

Behind her sat the Wives and Families Committee, all hundred and forty of them, or it felt that way.

Twenty-two of them had signed affidavits against Bernadette, and they sat in the first three rows together.

A pool camera stood in the corner, and the judge had allowed it.

Bernadette came in last, on her lawyer's arm.

She wore navy and her pearls, and her silver hair was set.

She had been out on bond for nine days, and she looked at nobody.

Shelby sat on my left with her hands folded over her knees.

Ty sat on my right, close enough that his sleeve touched mine, and I let it.

Pete sat behind us and breathed through his nose.

"All rise," the bailiff said.

The judge took her seat and read the caption in a flat voice.

Interference with custody, falsified birth records, conspiracy to conceal a death.

Bernadette's lawyer was the man in the gray coat from the sunroom.

He stood and called her innocent of everything before anyone had said a word.

My lawyer called the retired nurse first.

She was seventy and wore a church dress, and she carried a plastic sleeve in both hands.

"I kept it for five years," she said. "I kept it because the weight on the chart was wrong, and I was told to leave it be."

"What is it?" my lawyer asked.

"The pink carbon from the delivery room. Baby boy, six fifty-two in the morning, seven pounds two ounces."

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