He confirmed her name. He did not sit down. He nodded slightly to the man beside him.
The documents landed on the glass table between Sandra's drink and her phone with a sound that was louder than it should have been—the kind of sound that carries in a quiet outdoor space and draws the attention of neighboring tables.
The process server stated the words clearly enough for those tables to hear: defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, false light, filing a false police report resulting in bodily injury, civil rights violation.
And then the plaintiff: "The Honorable Dorothea Caldwell, retired chief judge of the Harlan County Superior Court. The woman whose home you directed armed police officers to. The woman whose body bore the marks of what followed."
Sandra's tablemates left in the sequence of people who have understood simultaneously that they want no proximity to what is about to happen: first one, then the second, then the third, each of them gathering their bags with the same economy of motion and the same avoidance of eye contact. Sandra was left alone with the documents.
But Beaumont was not finished. He leaned forward very slightly and said, "There is one more thing." He said it in the voice of a man who has been saving something.
"Mrs. Bellwether," he said, "when you called emergency services on the morning of the 22nd, you told the dispatcher that my client looked completely out of place. Do you remember saying that?"