Sterling’s detailed confession in exchange for a sentence he would still not enjoy, and my own testimony.

I sat in the front row of the gallery with a boy pressed to either side of me.

Across the aisle, stripped of the designer clothes and the social standing that had always insulated them, Kenneth Pembroke and Beatrice Fairchild sat in orange jumpsuits, their wrists shackled to the heavy defense table.

And then the defense did something I should have predicted and somehow had not.

Beatrice’s expensive attorney rose, offered no denial of the facts, and pointed straight across the aisle at my husband.