Chapter 20: The Plea

Gideon's POV

I left both cameras in the truck on Friday.

It was the first courtroom I had walked into in nine years without one.

Margo sat in the second row with her hands folded and her good leg crossed over her knee.

Nell was on her left.

I took the seat behind them.

Nobody had asked me to sit beside her, and I knew better than to assume.

At nine the deputies brought Reid in through the side door.

He wore the county jumpsuit and two days of stubble.

He looked for her once.

When he found her, he looked straight ahead and did not look again.

The judge was a woman in her sixties with reading glasses on a chain.

She asked him whether he understood the charges.

"Yes, Your Honor."

"You've been advised you have the right to a trial."

"I don't want one."

"Mr. Garrity, you've been told what this plea means. Prison, in all likelihood."

"I understand."

"Then tell me what you did."

He told her.

He said it flatly, in four sentences, and it was the same story he had told the gallery.

The car, the phone, the road.

He said he had stayed with her.

He said he had lied about it afterward.

He said he had let his father fix it.

When he finished, the courtroom was so quiet I could hear the clock over the door.

"How do you plead?"

"Guilty."

I kept my eyes on the back of Margo's head.

Her shoulders didn't move.

The judge called a ten-minute recess before sentencing.

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