CHAPTER 1: THE TILE AT COURTROOM 4B
The marble floor beneath my cheek was neither cold nor hard; it had passed through pain into an unyielding, vibrating void.
Fluorescent light—four thousand Kelvin of buzzing, industrialized daylight—fractured across the polished gray granite of Courtroom 4B like split mica. Above me, the vaulted cedar ceiling of the Douglas County Courthouse seemed to heave outward, exhaling an ancient smell of unread appellate briefs, damp radiator steam, and eighty years of human misery.
My right hand lay curled against the base of the witness box, fingers hooked uselessly around the walnut moulding.
Through the ringing in my ears—a flat, unbroken tone pitched at the exact frequency of an electric wire snapping in a winter gale—the world arrived in jagged, desynchronized fragments.
“She’s holding her breath, Your Honor!” Patricia Whitaker’s voice did not carry panic. It had that bright, brisk, suburban sharpness she used when returning bruised peaches to an organic grocer. “Look at her lips! She does this at Thanksgiving! She did it when Daniel refused to co-sign the lease on her studio! It’s histrionic personality disorder! It’s in the diagnostic manual!”
