And for a moment — just a moment — he sounded like the man I had married.
“I know you did,” I said.
“That’s what makes it worse.”
I ended the call and sent Patricia a recording of it.
She had told me to keep my phone set to record any calls from him.
That night I went to bed at nine and slept for seven hours straight — the longest unbroken sleep I’d had in five years.
I didn’t know that was what relief felt like until I woke up in it.
The trial took four months to reach a verdict.
I will not describe every day of it.
Some of it was procedural and slow.
Some of it was brutal in the specific way that courtrooms can be brutal — clinical language wrapped around the worst moments of your life, evidence photographs, testimony delivered in flat voices about things that were anything but flat.
