COURTROOM MORNING | CLOSING ARGUMENTS DAY | 9:15 AM
Rain tapped against the courtroom windows again, but today’s rain was different—fine, persistent, like the inescapable seep of finality as the trial neared its end. Stella wore her original grey suit. Not armor, not a uniform, but the clothes of a witness. She counted: twenty-three steps from the first row to the witness stand. But the person walking that distance today was not her.
Sir James Morris adjusted the curl on his wig—an action he’d performed for forty years, but today his fingers paused half a second longer. When he turned to the jury, the entire courtroom held its breath.
“Members of the jury,” his voice was lower than usual, less the barrister’s rhetoric and more an elder’s telling, “for the past three weeks, we have walke
