I was done looking away.
There was a strange doubling in hearing it played back in that room.
I had lived it once, from under the table, in terror, in the dark, with blood on my hand.
Now I sat upright in a courtroom in daylight in a good suit and heard the same words fill a public space, stripped of all their power to frighten me, transformed into nothing but evidence.
The voice that had once been the most familiar sound in my life — the voice that had said good morning and I love you and let’s finish the house paperwork tonight — came out of the courtroom speakers now as what it had always secretly been: the flat, cold recitation of a man describing his own crimes because he’d been too arrogant to imagine a room he couldn’t talk his way out of.
Somewhere in the middle of it I realized I was not gripping the bench.
My hands were resting easy in my lap.
The recording could not touch me anymore.
My father had been right about everything, all the way down.
Hearing it with my own ears hadn’t just freed me from Damian two months ago in a kitchen.
It was freeing me again now, in public, permanently, one played-back sentence at a time.
Chapter 25 — The Judge Obliterated Him
Karla took the stand and testified about the forged signature and the lies about his marriage.
Beatriz walked the jury through the bank records, the systematic theft from my father, the forged evaluation.