August 13, Thursday

The forensic accountant took the stand with the unhurried precision of a man who clearly loved spreadsheets and by the second hour of his testimony, I was glad I had my knitting to keep me awake. In front of me, two jurors were nodding off.

"Defendant's Exhibit 14 shows a series of transfers from Blackthorne Holdings LLC to what's listed as a consulting firm in the Caymans," he explained, adjusting his glasses at the projector. "That consulting firm has no employees, no office space, and no discernible business activity beyond receiving these transfers."

Numbers scrolled across the screen—six figures, then seven, funneled through companies with names so deliberately bland they seemed engineered to be forgotten the moment you read them. Blackthorne Family Ventures. Meridian Property Partners. Coastal Sunrise Holdings. I thought of the HOA lien I'd once talked the board out of pursuing, the modest crisis of a few hundred dollars in unpaid dues, and felt the peculiar vertigo of two entirely different scales of dishonesty.

My needles kept moving through all of it, the basket-weave pattern deep enough now that I barely needed to look down.

At one point, glancing up to reposition my yarn, I caught the eye of a young attorney at the prosecution table—one of the junior associates who spent most of her days passing notes and organizing binders. She was looking at the blanket in my lap, an expression flickering across her face that I recognized instantly, the specific tenderness reserved for anything pink and half-finished and destined for someone small. She caught herself, glanced back at her legal pad, but not before I'd seen it. I wondered if she had children of her own or maybe aspired to.

My mind drifted, unbidden, to Lily and Josh as infants—the particular chaos of those years that had felt, at the time, like drowning, and now, from this distance, looked almost enviably simple. Warren coming home smelling like new-car interior, scooping up whichever child was fussing while I finally sat down for the first time all day. I remembered nursing Josh at two in the morning in the rocking chair by the window in our old house on Birchwood Lane, thinking with the exhausted, hormonal certainty of new motherhood that nothing would ever be harder than this.

I'd been wrong, obviously. But there had been an order to it back then, a shape to the days that made sense, even at their most sleepless—

"—and can you walk the jury through the significance of these particular transfer dates?" McDavid's voice pulled me back, sharp and direct.

I blinked, refocused, found my place in the testimony the way I'd find my place in a knitting pattern. The accountant was explaining how three of the largest transfers had occurred within days of documented meetings between Blackthorne and men the prosecution had already tied to the murder-for-hire charge.

Money moving. Meetings happening. This pattern seemed to be closing a loop around the man at the defense table.  ~

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