Chapter 18 - The Trial
I testified on a Tuesday in late October, the courtroom windows framing a mountain ridge just beginning to turn gold.
I wore my wedding ring. I had debated removing it, worried it might read as performance to a jury, but Helen assured me juries generally responded better to authenticity than to careful staging, and the ring was, undeniably, authentic.
The prosecutor walked me through the afternoon in the kitchen slowly, methodically, giving the jury time to absorb each detail — the milk, the medication, the sound my glasses made sliding across the tile.
Vanessa's defense attorney, on cross-examination, tried gently to suggest my memory of the events might have been affected by my medication, by grief, by the general confusion of a difficult year.
"Mrs. Wilson, isn't it possible you misremember some of these details?"
"It's possible I misremember what I ate for breakfast that morning," I said. "It is not possible I misremember my daughter-in-law's hand striking my face."
The jury deliberated for six hours across two days.
Guilty on the forgery count. Guilty on attempted fraudulent conveyance. Not guilty on the assault charge, the jury apparently persuaded by conflicting testimony about the exact sequence of events in a kitchen with no camera and only two witnesses — one of them the defendant herself.
I sat with that outcome for a long time afterward, turning it over the way I'd once turned over the anonymous letter.
Justice, I was learning, rarely arrived complete. It arrived in fragments, some satisfying, some infuriating, and the work of living afterward was learning to hold both without letting the infuriating fragment poison the satisfying one.
Vanessa received eighteen months, with the possibility of parole after nine, alongside the restitution already established through the civil settlement.
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Daniel sat beside me throughout the trial, his hand occasionally finding mine on the hard wooden bench, and when the verdict was finally read, he exhaled a breath I suspected he'd been holding, in one form or another, for almost a year.
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