He knew about those arms. He had never seen them, but he knew because he had been the one to set a cold water bottle on a table beside her without asking questions. And he had understood even then that the long sleeves in August were not about temperature. He had never asked, and she had never told him, and that had been the terms of whatever trust existed between them.
Now she had blown the whole thing open in a federal courtroom in front of strangers for him, and there was no way to hold that without something breaking. Sloan looked at his own hands. His expression had moved through several versions of itself in the last two minutes, and arrived somewhere that wasn't quite recognition, and wasn't quite remorse, but occupied the territory between them. The place a man stands when he has done something publicly that he cannot privately justify.
He told the court officers to stand down. He told Barrett's aid that the admiral could remain as an observer. He did not apologize. Not yet.
He told Clare she could approach the stand, and his voice had shed the particular authority it had carried since the session began. Clare picked up her jacket, draped it over the railing, and walked to the witness stand. The questioning from the defense moved through the established facts, her professional background, her connection to Mason, through the veterans recovery program, her clinical expertise in trauma medicine. Clare answered each question in the same register she had maintained since she walked in precise, unembellished, stripped of emotional ornamentation.
When Aaron Delaney Mason's defense attorney asked her to describe Mason's state of mind based on her professional assessment, she said the question was slightly wrong. She said she couldn't speak to his state of mind. She could speak to his actions and she could explain what those actions indicated about his training and his decision-making in a high stress situation. Miles Corbett objected before she could continue.
He was a careful prosecutor who knew better than to attack a witness directly when the room's sympathy had shifted. So he attacked the methodology instead, suggesting that Clare's relationship with Mason compromised her objectivity, that her assessment was advocacy dressed as expertise. He noted with the even tone of someone who believes they are stating the obvious, that Trevor Langston had been hospitalized with a fractured jaw, a shattered orbital socket, and injuries that had required surgery. Clare did not dispute the injuries.
She said the injuries were in fact the point. She asked the court's permission to walk through the medical record of what had been found when Trevor Langston arrived at the emergency room documentation she had subsequently reviewed in full. Sloan, operating now in a more careful register than he had occupied an hour ago, granted the request. Clare laid it out with the efficiency of someone who had explained complex physiological events under conditions considerably more difficult than a courtroom.