The courtroom was small, with blond wood paneling and a seal on the wall and maybe a dozen people in the gallery. Georgine came in with her lawyer and her nephew. She was wearing a navy suit that was a little loose on her, and she looked smaller than I remembered, and older, and she walked carefully, the way you walk when your back has been bad for a long time. She didn't look at us. She stood at the table when the judge told her to and answered every question in a clear, steady voice. Yes, Your Honor. I understand, Your Honor. Guilty, Your Honor.
When the judge asked whether she wished to make a statement, she said she did, and she turned around, for the first time, and looked at the gallery. Not at me. At Pia.
"Miss Osgood," she said. "I have spent most of my life making sure that when people turned on their taps, water came out. That was my whole job. That was who I was. On the tenth of August, I turned off your water while you were in the shower, because I was afraid of being caught, and I hurt you, and I could have hurt you much worse. I left your house without any protection from fire. I let fertilizer into your drinking water. I did every single thing I spent thirty-one years teaching young men not to do." Her voice didn't break, but it thinned. "There isn't anything I can say to you that makes that all right. I'm not going to ask you to forgive me. I just wanted you to know that I know what I did, and I know whose fault it was, and that it wasn't yours, not any part of it. Not the bleach. Not any of it. It was mine."
Pia didn't say anything. She sat very straight beside me with her hands folded in her lap, and she looked back at Georgine, steadily, for what felt like a long time, and then she nodded, just once, a small, grave nod, the way you'd nod to somebody across a room to say you'd heard them.
Georgine turned back around. The judge accepted the plea.
Outside, on the courthouse steps, it was cold and bright, with old snow in the gutters. Pia zipped her coat up to her chin. We were halfway to the car when she said, "Dad. Can I ask you something?"