Chapter 59 Not found guilty

Chapter 59 Not found guilty
Cole called at nine.
We were at my mother's kitchen table with toast and coffee and my mother was pretending to read the newspaper while listening to everything, which she had always done and had never been subtle about.
Bruno answered and put it on speaker without being asked.
"Richard entered a not guilty plea at eight this morning," Cole said. "His lawyer filed a motion simultaneously requesting a change of judge on grounds of procedural bias." A short pause. "The motion was denied within the hour. Judge Adler stays on the case."
"When does it go to trial?" Bruno said.
"Six weeks," Cole said. "We are ready. The evidence is substantial and the defence knows it." Her voice was flat and certain. "This is a delay tactic. His lawyers are buying time to look for angles that do not exist."
"He told Phoebe about her father to destabilise her before trial," Bruno said.
"I assumed that was the reason for the meeting," Cole said. "Ms. Lambert, how are you?"
"Ready," I said.
A short silence.
"Good," Cole said. "I will need you in my office Thursday. We go through your testimony in detail and I tell you exactly what his lawyers will try."
"I will be there," I said.
Cole ended the call.
My mother set the newspaper down.
She looked at me across the table and then at Bruno and then back at me.
"Six weeks," she said.
"Yes," I said.
"Then you have six weeks to live your life before you have to walk into that room," she said. She stood and picked up the empty plates. "I suggest you use them."
She took the plates to the sink and ran the water and Bruno looked at me across the table.
"She is right," he said.
"She is always right," I said. "It is one of her more exhausting qualities."
Bruno almost smiled.
We left my mother's at eleven with the car full of things she had insisted we take. A jar of something she had made in September. Two books she said I had to read. A plant she had divided from one in the garden that she described as impossible to kill, which I took as a challenge directed specifically at me.
Bruno loaded all of it without complaint and shook my mother's hand at the door and she held it with both of hers for a moment and looked at him.
"Thursday," she said. "After Cole. Come back here for dinner."
"We will," Bruno said.
She looked at me.
"Both of you," she said. Not as a question.
"Both of us," I said.
She went inside and I stood at the car and looked at the house and the door closing and the wisteria bare above it and Bruno came and stood beside me.
"She just adopted you," I said.
"Good," he said.
We drove back to the city.
Bruno drove with one hand on the wheel and the other hand holding mine on the seat and the plant from my mother's garden was on the back seat beside the jar of something and the two books and none of it was necessary and all of it was exactly right.
"What do you want to do?" Bruno said. "Six weeks. Your mother said use them."
I thought about it honestly.
"I want to finish what I started in the Lisbon studio," I said. "I have three canvases in my head that I did not have time to start."
"We can go back," he said.
"Not yet," I said. "I want to paint here first. In the apartment. I want to make something in the place where all of this happened and put it on the wall and look at it every day."
Bruno was quiet for a moment.
"There is a room," he said. "Off the main bedroom. I have been using it for storage. It has a good window."
"East-facing?" I said.
"South," he said.
"South is better," I said.
"I know," he said. "That is why I mentioned it."
I looked at him.
"You were planning to give me that room," I said.
"Since the week I booked Lisbon," he said.
I looked at the road ahead and the blue sky above it and thought about a south-facing room full of storage that Bruno had been mentally clearing for weeks without saying anything and felt the particular warmth of being known by someone without having to explain yourself.
"I also want to go and see Daniel," I said.
Bruno glanced at me.
"Properly," I said. "Not a dinner where everyone is careful. A real visit where I get to know him the way I should have from the beginning."
Bruno was quiet for a moment.
"He will like that," he said.
"I know," I said. "He is going to need people around him when this trial starts. His name is in it and the coverage will not be kind."
"No," Bruno said.
"He did the right thing eventually," I said. "That counts."
Bruno looked at the road.
"Yes," he said. "It does."
We reached the city at one and Bruno parked and we carried everything up and the plant from my mother went on the kitchen windowsill and the jar went in the cupboard and the books went on the shelf and Bruno opened the storage room door and we stood in the doorway and looked at it.
Boxes. An old lamp. Two chairs stacked. A bicycle he had clearly not ridden in years.
"The window is good," I said.
"I told you," he said.
"We could clear it today," I said.
He looked at the boxes and the bicycle and the stacked chairs.
"Yes," he said. "We could."
We spent two hours clearing it. Bruno carried boxes to the hallway and I found a home for things that had one and Bruno put the bicycle in the storage unit in the basement and at three in the afternoon the room was empty except for the afternoon light coming in through the south window and lying across the bare floor in a warm rectangle.
I stood in the middle of it.
Bruno stood in the doorway.
"Well?" he said.
"Perfect," I said.
He looked at me standing in the empty room in the south light and said nothing and I felt him looking and did not move because there was no performance left in me and he had chosen this version specifically and I had stopped being surprised by that and started simply being glad.
"I need an easel," I said.
"Already ordered," he said. "It arrives tomorrow."
I turned and looked at him.
"Bruno," I said.
"Yes."
"I love you," I said, but just as I was about to adjust myself his phone rang in his pocket.
He did not move to answer it.
It rang again.
"Bruno," I said.
"I know," he said and he did not let go.
It rang a third time and he sighed against my hair and reached for it without stepping back and looked at the screen.
His face changed.
"It is my accountant's lawyer," he said.
I looked at him.
"Matteo," he said. "He is asking to meet. Today. He says there is something he did not tell the investigators."
"Something about Richard?" I said.
"Something about my father," Bruno said. "And the night he died."