Then Cho looked at the judge. Your honor, I would like to consult with an attorney before answering further questions. Whitmore looked at him for a long moment. Dr. Cho, he said, you are currently under subpoena to testify in this proceeding. However, you do have the right to decline to answer questions that may incriminate you.
I will note for the record that the invocation of that right in this context carries its own significance. He looked at the jury when he said it. The jury understood, "Sir," the room erupted, not physically, nobody stood up, nobody shouted, but there was a collective movement of sound and energy through the gallery that filled the high ceiling in space the way a wave fills a container. Victoria heard Marcus behind her make a sound, not a word, just a breath released with force. She heard Ethan say something to Dennis in a low urgent voice that she couldn't make out from where she sat.
She heard Carl Ree asked for a recess and Judge Whitmore deny it with a brevity that communicated exactly how Whitmore was feeling about the shape of the afternoon. She felt the moment the way she felt the moments in trauma bays when the tide turns. Not with celebration because there was still too much uncertainty, too much that could go wrong, too many ways for something true to be made smaller by process, but with the unmistakable physical sensation of weight beginning to shift. Dennis Marsh let the chaos settle for exactly as long as was professionally appropriate. Then he turned to the bench.
Your honor, in light of Dr. Chose testimony and his invocation. The defense would like to formally request that this court consider whether the evidentiary record in this case has been compromised in a way that materially prejudices the defendant. Ree was on his feet. The prosecution objects to any characterization of the evidentiary record as compromised based on the testimony of a witness who has not fully answered the questions put to him. Mr. Reese, Whitmore said.
The word landed like a period at the end of a sentence. Ree stopped. Whitmore looked at him. The prosecution's objection is recorded. The court will take a 30-minute recess to review the implications of this afternoon's testimony.
Both council will meet with me in chambers. He stood. Everyone stood. Victoria watched Whitmore leave through the door behind the bench. She watched Ree follow, moving with the controlled urgency of a man who is managing the distance between a bad situation and a catastrophic one.
She watched Dennis Marsh stop at the defendant's table on his way past and put one hand briefly on Ethan Cole's shoulder. Ethan looked up. Dennis said something she couldn't hear. Ethan nodded. Then Dennis was gone, too, and Ethan sat alone at the defendant's table in a slightly rumpled press shirt, and the courtroom around him held its breath.
Marcus leaned forward from two rows back. "Victoria," he said quietly. She turned. His face had none of its habitual guardedness. He looked like what he was a man who had been carrying the weight of something unresolved for 4 years, watching that weight begin to lift. "
The thing you said to Ree this morning," he said about being in rooms where the truth needed time and positioning to survive. "Yes, you've been doing this longer than nursing," he said. It wasn't an accusation. It was an observation and underneath it was a question he hadn't quite asked. Victoria looked at him.
She thought about all the versions of her life that were true and how few people had ever been given more than one of them at a time. My mother was a public defender, she said. For 22 years, I watched her fight cases that couldn't be won through evidence alone because the evidence had been shaped before she got to it. I watched her lose some of them. I watched her find the ones she could win and find them the hard way.
She paused. I went into nursing because I wanted to be in the room before the evidence was written, so I could read the truth before anyone had a chance to edit it. Marcus looked at her for a long time. "Your mother," he said. "Is she still practicing?" "
She died 6 years ago," Victoria said. "I'm sorry." "She knew who she was," Victoria said. "That's a thing I've come to understand means a great deal." They sat in a courtroom that had just been turned inside out, and neither of them said anything for a while.
Outside the chambers door, something was happening that would determine the shape of the rest of this case. Inside the gallery, a few people had stayed the journalist with the small notepad, two family members who had pressed close together, Curtis the bailiff, standing quietly near the door. And at the defendant's table, Ethan Cole sat with his hands folded and waited for someone to tell him what came next. Victoria stood. She walked to the defendant's table.
She pulled out the chair next to Ethan and sat down without asking permission because the moment didn't call for permission. Ethan looked at her. Your uncle, she said. James Cole. Something moved across Ethan's face.
You know, Marcus told me during the lunch recess. Ethan looked down at his hands. His jaw worked. When he looked up, his eyes were bright in a way that had nothing to do with the fluorescent lights. He never told me, Ethan said.
Uncle James. He never said who she was. Who you were. He just every year on a specific date in the fall, he gets real quiet for a while. And when I was old enough to ask, he said there was a night that changed what he thought was possible.
That was all he said. He said a night that changed what he thought was possible. Victoria was quiet. He didn't know it was you when Dennis contacted him. Ethan said he just knew that Pullman was trying to end my life over something I saw that I wasn't supposed to see, and he was willing to try anything.
And Marcus found you and none of us knew until today. Ethan, she said, he looked at her. Whatever happens in that chambers meeting, and I think it's going to go the right way. I think the judge has seen enough that he cannot unsee you should know that the truth of what happened on Crestston Avenue was always going to come out. It might have taken longer without the testimony today.
It might have taken a different route, but the body doesn't lie and eventually someone reads it correctly. You did, he said. Your body did, she said. I just read it. He looked at her for a long moment.
Then why did you go into that building four years ago? My uncle's never been able to figure it out. He said, "You came from nowhere and you knew exactly what you were doing, and when it was over, you were gone." He said he's never understood it. Victoria thought about how to answer that.
She thought about her mother, who had taken cases no one else would take because someone had to. She thought about the 11 years of trauma bays and the particular knowledge that accumulated in your body when you spent enough time in rooms where people were fighting to stay alive. She thought about the specific moment 4 years ago when she had heard the radio call and understood that the people who were supposed to go in were not going in and that the choice was hers. I was close, she said. I had the training and they were in there.