“Your own sister,” Opal said.
“My own sister.”
“And your lawyer?”
“He was a nice man,” I said. “He tried. But he couldn’t prove their evidence was false. It was my word against theirs. And there were two of them, and they had papers, and I just had my word.”
The jury was out for four hours.
When the foreman read the verdict, Trevor was sitting in the second row behind the prosecutor’s table. He looked down at his shoes.
Monica was sitting next to him.
She looked straight at me.
Opal listened to all of it without interrupting. Not once. She just sat there with her soup going cold and her hands folded on the table.
When I finished, she was quiet for a long time.
“Do you have any documents?” she said. “From those years?”
I hesitated.
“I kept a few copies,” I said. “When things started to go wrong, before I was arrested, I printed some things out. A few emails. A bank statement. I didn’t really know what I was looking for. I just knew something was wrong. I hid them in a safe deposit box in my maiden name, at a bank Trevor didn’t use. My lawyer never even used them. He said they didn’t prove anything.”
