Then Sean read his opening statement. It was a page and a half. Neal had not been allowed to see it in advance; Raman had said the board could tell when a family had written a man's words for him. Sean read it in a low voice, too fast at first, and then, when Rosado said kindly, "Take your time, Mr. Dwyer, we're not going anywhere," slower. He said Elijah Galvin's name in the first sentence. He said he had killed him. He did not say the pills, or the beer, or the girl. He said, near the end, "There is no version of that night where I am not the reason Elijah isn't here. I have spent fifteen years trying to find one, and there isn't one, and I've stopped looking."
Then the questioning began, and it went on for an hour and twenty minutes, and it was worse than anything Neal had imagined, and he had imagined a great deal.
They took him through the night minute by minute. Where he stood. What he drank. What he took and where he got it. Hartigan asked about the knife, where he had bought it, why, how many times he had carried it before, and Sean said, "Every day that summer, sir. I thought it made me look like something," and Hartigan wrote on his pad without looking up. Shanahan asked about his disciplinary record, which had two reports on it, both in the first year, a fight in the chow line and a refusal to return to his cell, and none since 2013. Dr. Quintero asked about his recovery, about the meetings, about the twelve years since his last drink, and whether he could describe a moment in the past year when he had wanted to use, and what he had done instead, and Sean described a night in February after a phone call with his mother about her hip when he had stood at the window of his cell and wanted it so badly his teeth hurt, and had sat on the floor and written out the names of every man he had sat with in hospice until the wanting went away. "There were nineteen," he said. "It took a while. I did their birthdays too."
Then Quintero turned a page on her legal pad and said, "Mr. Dwyer, the trial record says that before the stabbing you said to Elijah Galvin, Do you know who my father is."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Your father is a police officer."
"Yes, ma'am. He's here."
"I know." She did not look at Neal. "I want to ask you what you meant by it. Not what the prosecutor said you meant. What you meant."
Sean was quiet for a long time. The second hand went around the clock over the platform. Neal could feel Maureen's hand on his knee, gripping.
"I meant I was untouchable," Sean said. "I meant nothing I did was going to count. I'd been pulled over the year before, drunk, and it went away. I'd been picked up for a fight at a Bruins game when I was seventeen, and it went away. Every time, I'd say his name, and it went away. Nobody ever told me to say it. Nobody had to." He stopped. "I'm not blaming him. I want to be clear about that. My father never put a knife in my pocket. But I said it because it had always worked, and I thought it would work on Elijah, and when Elijah said he didn't care, I didn't have anything else. I didn't have anything inside me. It was just the name, and then the name didn't work, and then it was the knife." He looked down at his folded hands. "Ms. Reddick says every man who comes into the program has a thing he used instead of himself. That was mine."