Chapter 102: Richard's Trial

Chapter 102: Richard's Trial
Amelia's POV

The trial started on a Tuesday and lasted eleven days.

I went every single one of them and so did Grayson, sitting at the front of the gallery in the same seats each morning like we'd claimed them, which in a way we had, because being there mattered, not just legally but in some other way that was harder to explain, something about bearing witness to the end of something that had nearly ended us first.

The courtroom was formal and procedural and nothing like the movies make it look, mostly it was documents and lawyers talking and long stretches of careful language that said significant things in the most deliberately undramatic way possible, and I sat through all of it and paid attention and felt Grayson beside me doing the same.

Thomas testified on the fourth day.

He walked in looking older than he'd looked even in the hospital, thinner, moving with the careful deliberateness of a man who understood the weight of the room he was walking into and wasn't trying to minimize it, and he took the seat and looked at the judge and answered every question put to him clearly and without deflecting.

I watched him from the gallery and felt the complicated thing I always felt about Thomas Raine and let it be complicated without trying to resolve it into something simpler because some things weren't meant to be simple.

He didn't look at Richard once during his testimony.

Richard's lawyer tried the usual things, credibility attacks, inconsistencies in the timeline, suggesting Thomas's motivations were self-serving, and Thomas sat through all of it with a patience that surprised me and answered each challenge the same way, directly and without elaborating more than the question required, and I thought about my mother who had been the calmest person in any room she was in and understood for the first time where that quality had come from.

William's recording was played on the sixth day.

The courtroom went very still when it came through the speakers, that older rougher voice saying careful deliberate things, and I watched the jury and watched Grayson and watched Richard across the room and the only person who seemed completely unmoved was Richard himself, which was either composure or the absence of something essential, and I couldn't decide which.

Grayson never looked at Richard during the recording.

He looked straight ahead at the middle distance the whole time, hands loose on his knees, and I slipped my hand into his and he turned his palm up and held it and that was all.

When the recording finished and the room shifted back into the ordinary sounds of a courtroom, Grayson still didn't look at Richard and I understood that too, that looking would have given something and he had decided long ago not to give Richard anything.

The verdict came on the eleventh day and it came quickly, which the lawyers had said was usually a good sign, and the jury filed back in and the foreperson stood and read the words and Richard Chen was found guilty on all counts and the room absorbed it in that particular courtroom way, not silence exactly but a collective stillness, and then it moved on because courtrooms moved on, that was what they did.

Richard was led out and as he passed the gallery his eyes went to Grayson and he stopped, just briefly, just long enough to say something, and his voice was low enough that most people didn't catch it but I did and Grayson did.

"You were never supposed to exist," Richard said. "This whole thing. You. None of it was supposed to happen."

Grayson looked at him then, finally, directly, and the look was steady and completely without heat, the look of someone who had nothing left to prove to this person, and he said quietly, "And yet."

The guard moved Richard along and he was gone and the room started emptying around us and I held Grayson's hand and didn't say anything because nothing needed saying and he looked down at our hands and then at me and something in his face was finally, completely, settled.

\---

Victoria's hearing was two weeks later and shorter.

She entered a guilty plea as promised and her only request, which the judge granted without much deliberation, was that a formal acknowledgment of Isabelle Cross be entered into the public record, a name, a date, a brief statement that she had existed and that her existence had been deliberately concealed.

It was a small thing in the context of everything else Victoria had done, but I understood why she'd asked for it and I thought about my mother again and about that phone call she'd made to a woman she had every reason to avoid, and I thought sometimes the smallest things are the ones that matter most to the people carrying them.

I was in the gallery for Victoria's hearing too, without Grayson this time because he'd said it was my call whether to go and I'd said I wanted to and he'd said okay and hadn't asked why, which was one of the things I loved most about him, that he'd stopped asking me to justify the choices that were mine to make.

When it was over I went outside and sat on the courthouse steps in the cold and stared at the street and felt the particular emptiness that comes after something enormous has finished, not bad emptiness, just the kind where you've been braced for so long that stopping the bracing takes a minute.

Grayson found me there twenty minutes later because of course he did, because that was who he was, and he sat beside me without asking questions and I leaned against his shoulder.

"She asked for her daughter's name to be in the record," I said.

"I know," he said.

"My mother was the only person who ever said sorry to her," I said. "For years. Nobody else."

"Your mother was exceptional," he said simply.

We sat there for a while and the city moved around us and it was cold enough that our breath showed and Grayson put his arm around me and I thought about Isabelle Cross who had existed briefly and been unmourned by the world and was now, finally, on record, and I thought about my mother who had seen the grief under the monster and acknowledged it, and I thought you couldn't always fix things but sometimes you could just witness them properly and that was something.

That was actually something.

"Let's go home," Grayson said eventually.

"Yes," I said, and stood up, and we walked to the car together in the cold, and it was over.