The first morning of deliberation did not feel like anything at all.That was, I think, what surprised me most about it. I had expected the waiting to announce itself somehow — a particular quality of dread hanging over the house, some visible weight settling into every room the way it had settled into the courtroom during the worst days of testimony. Instead I woke at six, the same time I had woken every morning of the trial, and lay in bed for a long moment before I remembered that there was, for the first time in two weeks, nowhere I actually needed to be.No courthouse. No Patricia waiting with her folder of the day's evidence. No Henry laying out the dark suit the night before.Just a house, and a family inside it, and somewhere across the city, twelve strangers in a room I would never see, deciding.I got up anyway. Old habits did not unmake themselves simply because the reason for them had temporarily disappeared, and I found myself dressed and downstairs before seven, standing

By the time Lily came home from school, the afternoon had settled into the particular restless quiet that Henry had warned me about that morning — no news, no calls, nothing to organise the hours around, just the slow accumulation of time passing with the outcome still entirely unknown.Lily found me in the study, where I had drifted back after Brandon left, and climbed up into the chair across from my desk with the easy confidence of someone who had decided, without being told, that this was where she belonged for the afternoon."Did they decide yet," she asked, before she had even fully settled into the chair."Not yet," I said."How much longer do you think," she asked, and there was something genuinely curious in the question, rather than anxious, the particular directness of a child who had not yet learned to dread uncertainty the way adults had."I don't know," I said honestly. "Nobody knows. It could be tomorrow. It could be a few

I did not look at Victoria. I could not, in that first instant, tear my eyes away from the jury foreperson, from the plain, steady certainty in her voice, as though looking away too quickly might somehow unmake what had just been said."On the second count," Judge Adeyemi continued, her voice unwavering, "manslaughter, in the matter of James Blackwell — how do you find?""Guilty," the foreperson said."On the third count, manslaughter, in the matter of Nora Blackwell — how do you find?""Guilty," the foreperson said, for the third time, and I felt something in my chest finally, fully release, a year of held breath escaping all at once, and beside me I heard Yemi make a small sound that was not quite a sob but came close to one, and felt Henry's hand come to rest briefly, firmly, on my shoulder.I turned, finally, to look at Victoria.She had not moved.She stood exactly where she had stood when the verdict began, her pos

The press storm did not wait for morning.By the time I woke, barely six hours after finally falling asleep the night of the verdict, my phone had already accumulated more notifications than I had the patience to scroll through — messages from Gerald, from Patricia, from numbers I did not recognise claiming to represent one outlet or another, and beneath all of it, a headline from Sandra Wealth's own publication that Henry had apparently forwarded sometime after midnight with no comment attached, only the link itself.VICTORIA PIERCE CONVICTED: THE FULL STORY OF SARAH BLACKWELL, TWENTY YEARS IN THE MAKING.I read it standing in my bedroom in the grey early light, still in the clothes I had fallen asleep in the night before, and found that Sandra had done exactly what she had promised, months ago, in that meeting room — told the complete story, without flattering any version of it, including the parts that complicated rather than simplified my own place in it. She had included Victoria

Lily found me in the garden that evening, where I had gone to watch the last of the daylight fade behind the trees, and climbed up onto the bench beside me with her rabbit tucked under one arm, the same way she had climbed up onto so many benches, over so many difficult evenings, across this entire strange, extraordinary year."Henry told me about Daniel," she said. "Eight years. That's a really long time.""It is," I agreed."Longer than I've been alive," Lily observed, working through the maths with visible concentration. "Longer than I've been alive twice, almost.""Almost," I agreed again.She was quiet for a moment, swinging her feet where they did not quite reach the ground from the bench."Do you feel bad for him?" she asked. "Even though he was one of the bad people?"I considered the question carefully, the way I had learned to consider most of Lily's questions, understanding that she rarely asked something simp