Chương 2
Grant’s face emptied.
A faint sound came from Valerie behind him, not quite a gasp.
Grant turned toward the closed doors.
For the first time since Mara had known him, he looked afraid of whoever might come through them.
Judge Mercer removed his glasses.
“Mr. Ellison, sit down.”
Grant remained standing.
“Sit down.”
This time he did.
The judge looked toward Mara’s lawyer, Elena Park.
“Ms. Park, is Thomas Ellison in this building?”
Elena glanced at Mara.
That had not been the plan.
Thomas had agreed to provide a sample. He had agreed to sign an affidavit. He had agreed, after two weeks of argument, to speak with Elena privately.
He had not agreed to walk into a courtroom with Grant.
At least not when Mara had last spoken to him.
Elena stood.
“Yes, Your Honor.”
Grant’s head snapped toward her.
“Where?”
Judge Mercer’s expression hardened.
“You are not asking questions right now.”
Grant leaned back in his chair.
Valerie looked at the doors again.
Mara pressed her palm against the side of her belly.
The baby shifted under her hand, not dramatically, just the slow pressure of a knee or foot against skin.
It brought back something ordinary and almost ridiculous: Mara standing barefoot in the cereal aisle two weeks earlier while the baby kicked hard enough to make her stop pushing the cart. An elderly man had assumed she was having contractions and nearly summoned the store manager. Mara had laughed for the first time in days.
She had bought the wrong cereal afterward.
That box was still unopened in her sister’s pantry.
Judge Mercer called a recess.
The bailiffs remained inside the room.
One of them escorted Grant to a conference room with his attorney. Valerie tried to follow.
“No, ma’am,” the second bailiff said.
“I’m part of his legal team.”
Kell looked back from the doorway.
“No, you’re not.”
Valerie’s face changed.
Only slightly.
But Mara saw it.
For months Valerie had carried herself like a woman who had been promised that every room would eventually belong to her.
Now she stood alone between two rows of courtroom benches, holding a blank legal pad.
Mara almost felt sorry for her.
Almost.
Elena came around the table and looked at Mara’s wrist.
“We need medical photographs.”
“I know.”
“And I want you checked.”
“I’m fine.”
Elena gave her a look.
Mara sighed.
“Right. Sorry. Habit.”
“Bad habit.”
“Very.”
Elena lowered her voice. “Thomas changed his mind.”
Mara stared at her.
“He wants to testify?”
“He came in twenty minutes before the hearing. My paralegal has him in the witness room.”
Mara looked toward the wooden doors.
“Does Grant know?”
“I think we just answered that.”
Mara rubbed her thumb over the side of her wedding ring.
She still wore it because removing it had felt theatrical the first time she tried.
The ring had become just another object she forgot about until something pressed against it.
“Thomas said he wouldn’t come inside.”
“He said that yesterday.”
“What changed?”
Elena hesitated.
“He watched Grant grab you from the hallway monitor.”
Mara closed her eyes for a moment.
Court security had a monitor in the witness room displaying the courtroom feed without sound.
“He saw?”
“Yes.”
“That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“No.”
Mara looked toward the conference room where Grant had been taken.
“That’s why he’s coming in.”
Elena nodded.
Mara hated that answer.
Not because she wanted Thomas to leave.
Because she knew something about men deciding to become brave only after watching a woman get hurt.
Thomas Ellison had been alive for three years while Grant told everyone he was dead.
Alive while Grant took control of the company they had built together.
Alive while Grant told Mara that Thomas’s ashes had been scattered off Cape Hatteras.
Alive while Mara stood beside Grant at a memorial service in a hotel ballroom and accepted condolences from two hundred people.
She had worn black.
She had hugged Valerie there.
The memory made her feel briefly nauseated.
A paramedic from the courthouse medical unit examined her wrist in a side room. Nothing seemed broken, but he recommended imaging if the swelling worsened and strongly suggested she contact her obstetrician because she had stumbled.
“I didn’t land on my stomach.”
“That’s good.”
“I caught myself.”
“That’s also good.”
He smiled patiently.
“But call anyway.”
Mara nodded.
Her obstetrician’s office knew her by now as the woman who apologized before asking questions.
When she returned to the courtroom, Valerie was gone.
“Where did she go?” Mara asked.
Elena shrugged.
“Bailiff let her out when the judge authorized it. She said she had a meeting.”
“Of course she did.”
Mara sat down carefully.
The courthouse clock showed eleven seventeen.
She had not eaten since half a banana at six that morning.
Elena slid a granola bar across the table.
Mara looked at it.
“Is that legal advice?”
“It’s the only advice you’re getting for free.”
Mara laughed once through her nose and opened it.
That was how Thomas Ellison entered the courtroom: while Mara was chewing a dry oat-and-honey granola bar and trying not to get crumbs on her mustard-yellow dress.
He came through the rear doors with a bailiff beside him.
Mara had seen recent photographs.
They had not prepared her.
The man she remembered from three years earlier had been broad through the shoulders, deeply tanned, and impatient with restaurants that served small portions.
This Thomas was thinner.
His white hair was longer than Grant would ever have tolerated on himself. He wore a navy jacket that did not quite fit and walked with a slight drag in his left foot.
But the resemblance between father and son remained undeniable.
Same height.
Same line across the brow.
Same habit of entering a room as if expecting resistance.
Grant stood before anyone told him to.
“You.”
Thomas stopped.
Grant’s face changed so rapidly that Mara could not name any single emotion inside it.
Anger came first.
Then disbelief.
May you like
Then something younger.
Something like injury.
