"Practicing."
"For what?"
"For Dad."
She set the water on his desk, stood there for a moment, then said, quiet as a whisper, "You're going to win, right?"
Isaac looked at her reflection in the mirror. Twelve years old, already carrying more weight than any kid should.
"I'm going to try, Amara."
She nodded, walked back to her room, and closed the door without a sound. Isaac turned back to the mirror, took a breath, and started again from the top.
The night before the trial, he sat at the kitchen table one last time, notes spread across every inch of the surface. His legal pad was filled front and back—forty-six pages: a timeline of the night in question, a list of questions for Bradley Carson, a copy of Section 14-22 with key passages highlighted in yellow.
His hands were shaking, not from fear, but from everything: the weight of it, the size of it, the fact that tomorrow he would stand in a room full of adults who wanted him to fail, and he had one chance to prove them wrong. One chance.
He pressed his palms flat on the table, steadied his breathing, and looked at the empty chair across from him—his mother's chair.
"I got this, Mom," he whispered.
Then he gathered his notes, turned off the lamp, and went to bed. Tomorrow, the boy with the rattling alarm clock would walk into Courtroom 3, and nothing in Greenfield County would ever be the same.
The morning of the trial, Isaac arrived at the courthouse at 6:15 a.m. The building was nearly empty. A security guard nodded at him from behind the front desk. The hallways stretched out long and quiet: no lawyers, no clerks, no laughter, just the hum of the overhead lights and the echo of his sneakers on marble.
He wasn't there early to rehearse; he was there to walk.
Isaac retraced his father's route from the night of March 14th. He started on the third floor, west wing, where Elijah's cleaning log said he'd been assigned: bathrooms, conference rooms, the long hallway past the judges' chambers. Every step was mapped in Isaac's mind like a grid.
Then he walked to the second floor, east wing: the IT room, the place where $15,000 worth of equipment supposedly vanished. He stood in front of the locked door and looked up. A security camera, small, mounted in the corner where the ceiling met the wall, red light blinking.