I sat on that bench and I couldn’t speak.
Dad put his hand on my back. Just rested it there, between my shoulder blades, the way he used to when I was a little girl and had a nightmare.
“I’m sorry, Nicky,” he said.
“For what?”
“For not telling you. For not getting over there before he did it. I keep thinking, if I’d just gone over that last day. Knocked on the door. Taken it down off the wall myself and carried it out to my truck—”
“He’d have called the police on you.”
“Maybe.” He shook his head. “Maybe it would’ve been worth it.”
When we returned to the courtroom, Claire asked my father to come up and answer some questions about the second conversation.
Pruitt objected repeatedly. He objected to almost every question. The judge sustained some objections and overruled others and limited Dad’s testimony to what she considered relevant.
