Chapter 140: The Verdict

Ethan's POV

Two days.

The jury deliberated for two days and I spent both of them at home with Ginny, which was where I needed to be and where I found the waiting harder than any waiting room I'd sat in this year because at least in hospital corridors there was a thing to wait for and a direction to face.

This waiting had no direction.

Ginny read. She made tea. She sat at the window in the mornings and at the kitchen table in the afternoons and she was outwardly calm in the way she was outwardly calm when something was moving inside her that she'd decided not to show.

I worked.

Or I opened my laptop and looked at work, which was the version of working I was capable of while a jury twelve people strong deliberated the life of my brother in a room I couldn't see.

We didn't talk about it directly.

We talked about other things instead. About the children's center renovation, which the architects had submitted initial drawings for, with Holly's name in the design brief. About the baby's room, which we hadn't started yet and which Ginny had opinions about that she'd been keeping in a notebook since Switzerland. About ordinary things, the kind that filled a penthouse while two people waited for something large.

On the second evening I said: "Whatever they decide tomorrow—"

She looked at me.

"—we're still here," I said. "The same people. Whatever the verdict is."

She looked at me for a while.

"I know," she said.

"I just wanted to say it."

She reached across the kitchen table and took my hand.

We sat there until late.

The call came at two in the afternoon on the second day.

The jury had reached a verdict.

We looked at each other across the kitchen.

Ginny's doctor had cleared her for one brief appearance, the stress levels from sustained confinement to the penthouse while a significant legal event concluded had their own risk, and the doctor had made a practical concession. But we'd agreed together, carefully and without pressure, that she would go to the courthouse and watch from a private room rather than the gallery. Ryan would be with her. She wouldn't be in the public space.

I drove to the courthouse alone.

The building was more crowded than the first day. The word had moved fast. The corridor outside the courtroom had journalists and observers and the particular hum of a space that understood something significant was about to happen and was positioning to witness it.

I took my seat in the gallery.

I sat very still.

Lucas was brought in.

He looked the same as the first day. The composure. The posture. The suit.

He didn't look at me when he came in. He sat down. He spoke briefly to his lawyer. He looked at the jury box, which was empty, and waited.

The jury filed in.

Twelve people who had spent two days with the evidence and the testimony and the photographs and the footage and Ginny's words read aloud by Ryan in a still courtroom.

I looked at their faces as they sat.

Unreadable. Which was the point. Which was what they'd been instructed to be.

The judge spoke.

The formalities. The procedural language that preceded the thing everyone was there for.

And then the verdict.

“On the charge of murder in the first degree — guilty.”

The room didn't explode immediately. There was a half-second of collective stillness, the kind that happened when a large group of people processed something at the same moment, and then it moved. Reporters shifting. Murmurs rising. The defense team bending together in urgent conference. The prosecution team remaining very still with the particular controlled quality of people who had done their job correctly and were allowing themselves one moment to know it.

“On the assault charges — guilty.”

“On the conspiracy charges — guilty.”

Every count.

I sat in the gallery and heard each one and felt something that was not satisfaction and not relief but something that occupied the space where those feelings would eventually arrive.

Justice. The formal version. The version that arrived after evidence and testimony and two days of deliberation and landed with the weight of twelve people who had decided what the truth was.

The sentencing would come separately. Life imprisonment, no parole possibility for twenty-five years, was the likely outcome given the charges and the evidence and the jury's unanimity. His lawyers would file appeals. That was its nature. But the verdict was what it was.

Lucas stood through all of it.

Completely still.

His face was nothing. Not relief. Not devastation. Not the manufactured composure of the performance he'd been running all year. Just, nothing. Like a man who had arrived at the end of a very long journey and was simply standing at the terminus.

The judge concluded the proceedings.

Lucas was handcuffed.

The officers began moving him toward the side door.

And then he turned.

One moment. Just one. He turned his head and looked directly into the gallery.

He looked at me.

We looked at each other across the crowded room. Across the noise and the movement and the journalists and the distance of everything that had happened in the past year and the further distance of all the years before that.

I didn't look away.

Neither did he.

I thought about a seven-year-old copying my walk down a corridor.

A twelve-year-old wearing my jacket at dinner because his was at the cleaners. A blue notebook. She talked to me like I was worth knowing. I didn't expect that. I didn't account for it.

I thought about Holly Adams asking me to tell her something nobody knew.

I looked at my brother.

He looked at me.

Then the door closed and he was gone.

The private room was small.

Ryan was standing near the window when I came in. He turned when the door opened and then immediately looked at Ginny, the way you looked at the most important person when you came through a door with news.

Ginny was standing in the middle of the room.

Both hands over her mouth.

She looked at me.

"Guilty," I said. "Everything."

She closed her eyes.

She kept them closed for a moment.

When she opened them they were full. Not overflowing. Just full, the way eyes were full when something enormous had been held back long enough and finally had nowhere left to go.

"It's done," she said.

"It's done," I said back.

I crossed the room.

She walked toward me.

And she came into my arms and I held her, all of her, everything she'd been carrying all year and everything it had cost and the weight of this moment which was not an ending so much as the first thing that felt like solid ground.

Ryan turned quietly toward the window.

The sounds of the courthouse continued outside the room. The voices, the movement, the world processing what had just happened in a large public building on a Tuesday afternoon.

In the small room, I held my wife and she held me back.

That was the whole thing.

That was all of it.