ELLIOT
“She is not coming.”
He said it to Sera at seven in the morning on the day of the sentencing hearing with the particular flatness that communicated information rather than emotion. He had received his mother’s message forty minutes earlier and had spent those forty minutes deciding how to say it and had arrived at the conclusion that direct was the only version she would want.
Sera looked at him across the kitchen table.
“She told me last night,” Margaret had written. “I will watch the public broadcast of the proceedings. I do not trust myself to be in the same building as that man for six hours without it costing me something I do not have the right to spend in a courtroom.” She had added a second message four minutes later. “I have written a formal statement for the court. My
