Page 19 of Jury Woman, Part 4 of 6

And she did. Methodically, flag by flag, she walked us through three years of Robert Blackthorne's life. A meeting in the back room on Buford Highway. Four days later, a cash deposit into Riverside Holdings. Two days after that, a call from a burner phone to a number registered to Desmond Pike. A week later, a restaurant in Decatur burned to the studs.

Blue, green, yellow, red. Over and over.

Every witness we'd heard since July had handed us a single thread. Now Reyes was weaving them together in front of us, row upon row, until the pattern couldn't be mistaken for anything else.

By midmorning she'd reached the spring of last year. The flags crowded closer together. Meeting. Payment. Call. Photographs of a white house with black shutters logged as a single yellow flag with a number beside it. Then a blue flag for the back room, and Dellano's words from last week, close it, printed beneath in small block letters.

Then level three of the parking garage. The last red flag in the row.

Beside me, Yolanda had her hand pressed flat against her sternum, as if holding something in. Dwayne, who hadn't stopped joking since jury selection, sat rigid with his arms crossed and his jaw clamped. In the second row of the gallery, Renata Cole wasn't crying today. She was staring at that red flag with a stillness that was somehow worse than tears.

My own pulse was quick and uneven. I set down my pen because my fingers had started to shake.

And Robert Blackthorne sat at the defense table with one ankle propped on his knee, looking as relaxed as a man in a hammock.

He wasn't watching the timeline. He'd seen it, presumably. He'd lived it. Instead, his gaze drifted along the jury box, unhurried, the way a shopper browses a display case. Juror one. Juror two. Down the front row, then back along the second.

And then to me.

It stopped there. Stayed there. One second. Two.

I looked down at my blank notebook. He's looking at all of us, I told myself. That's his job right now. He's taking the temperature of the room. I made myself read the next flag on the chart. A payment. Six thousand dollars. I wrote the number down, just to have something to write.

My eyes crept back to him anyway.

He was still looking at me.

I jerked my attention to Reyes. Counted the green flags between March and May. Studied the grain of the wooden railing. Every time I felt steady enough, some treacherous part of me slid a glance toward the defense table, the way a tongue keeps returning to a sore tooth.

The fourth time, he smiled.

Not the arrogant sweep of a grin he'd given the jury pool on the first day. This was smaller and far more private. A slow lift at one corner of his mouth, meant for exactly one person in that box.

The blood drained from my face so fast I felt lightheaded.

Very carefully, I shifted in my chair, angling my shoulders toward the easels until Yolanda's broad frame sat squarely between me and the defense table. I couldn't see him anymore.

That should have helped. It didn't.

Because I knew he could still see me.

October 20, Tuesday

I'D CAST on Lily's headband last night in the hotel room, after staring at the ceiling for an hour and seeing nothing but red flags. This morning I brought it to court, a strip of the same rosy pink yarn as her gloves, twenty-two stitches wide, with a single cable twisting up the center like a braid.

It was for Lily, but it was my armor.

Agent Reyes resumed where she'd left off, adding flags to the timeline in the months after the garage. Payments to a lawyer. A burner phone switched off and never reactivated. A plane ticket to Miami for Desmond Pike, bought in cash.

I knit two, purled two, and listened.

People who don't knit assume it's mindless, something grandmothers do in front of the television. It's the opposite. A cable like this one is a small puzzle every eighth row: slip four stitches onto a spare needle, hold them in front of the work, knit the next four, then knit the four you set aside. Cross them in the wrong direction and the braid twists backward, and the mistake stares at you from every inch of fabric knit afterward. So some quiet part of my brain is always counting. Rows since the last cross. Stitches on the needle. Where I am in the pattern and what comes next.

That quiet counter never shuts off. It's the same one that tracked Josh's orthodontist appointments against Lily's cheer schedule against Warren's quarterly sales meetings, without a single calendar alert. It knew we were down to three eggs before anyone opened the fridge. It knew which permission slip was due Thursday and which child had lost it.

Knitting teaches you to hold several things in your head at once without letting any of them fall.

It also teaches you to read. Not words—fiber. An experienced knitter can glance at a finished piece and see its whole history: where the tension tightened because someone was upset, where a row was ripped back and reknit, where the gauge wandered because the knitter got bored. Every stitch is a record of the moment it was made.