The church friends came first — women she had not seen in two years, women Michael had told, one by one, that she was unwell, that she preferred quiet, that visits tired her. They came to the clubhouse in pairs, carrying casseroles and apologies, and they stood awkwardly among the motorcycles until Rosa ushered them into the kitchen, where Margaret received them with the same courtesy she had always shown, because courtesy was not something Michael had been able to take from her.
We believed him, said Edna, a woman Margaret had sung beside in the choir for twenty years, her hands twisting in her lap. "He said you were confused, Margaret. He said the doctor agreed. We didn't know what to do."
You did what you were told by someone you trusted, Margaret said. "I did the same thing for thirty years. There's no shame in it that belongs to you."
Edna wept, and Margaret held her hand, and something in Margaret's chest loosened — a knot she had carried so long she had mistaken it for part of herself. Isolation, she understood now, had not been an accident. It had been architecture, built wall by wall: the mail taken, the keys taken, the friends told to stay away. And now, with one arrest, the walls were coming down, and people were walking back through the gaps, carrying food and shame and love in equal measure.
The letters came next, in a tide. Rosa brought them in bundles from the post office box Sarah had arranged, and Margaret read them at the kitchen table in the evenings, slowly, because each one deserved a full reading. A former student from her years as a school secretary wrote that she had always been the kindest person in the office. A neighbor from two streets over wrote that she had suspected something and was sorry she had said nothing. A woman Margaret barely remembered wrote that she, too, had once been afraid in her own house, and that Margaret's courage had given her courage. Margaret answered as many as she could, in her neat, careful handwriting, thanking them, telling them she was safe, telling them the clubhouse had good coffee and better people.
Not all of the news was kind. Michael's lawyer — a sharp-suited man from a Spokane firm, with a voice made for television — gave an interview on the courthouse steps. Margaret watched it on the clubhouse television with Logan and Duke, and heard him say that his client was innocent, that the case rested on the "unreliable recollections of an elderly woman with a documented history of memory problems and heavy sedation," and that the so-called journal was "an old man's private notebook, open to interpretation." He smiled when he said it, the way men smile when they believe a room will agree with them.
Margaret watched the whole interview without flinching, and when it ended she switched the television off herself, with a steady hand.
He's doing his job, she said to Logan, who looked as if he might put a fist through the wall. "And his job is to make me sound like a woman who imagines things. But I know the difference between imagining and remembering. Imagining doesn't smell like sawdust."
Logan exhaled slowly. "You're steadier than most witnesses I've ever seen, Margaret. And I've seen plenty."
I'm steadier because I'm not alone anymore, she said. "That's the whole difference."
The days that followed settled into a new rhythm. Margaret mended jackets in the clubhouse and baked a pie for Sunday, and church friends came and went, and the letters kept arriving, and Sarah Kim prepared her for what was coming. Michael's lawyer filed motions, as lawyers do, and the prosecutor answered them, and the machine of the law ground forward, slow and inexorable. Margaret learned to live inside that slowness. She walked in the mornings with Rosa. She telephoned Ruth Alvarez, who was nervous about testifying and needed reassurance that her memory, too, counted. She sat with Sam while he organized his photographs into the dated file Ruiz would present, and she thanked him for the care he had taken when her bruises were fresh and her courage was not.
Sarah Kim, meanwhile, was preparing Margaret for the part of the story that had nothing to do with courtrooms: the attention itself. She came to the clubhouse one afternoon with a short list of rules, written in her own neat hand, and went through them at the kitchen table while Rosa made tea.
You don't have to talk to reporters, Sarah said. "If they come to the door, you refer them to me. If they telephone, you hang up politely. If they wait outside the courthouse, you walk past them with your head up, the way you did after the hearing. You owe them nothing, Margaret. Your testimony belongs in a courtroom, not on the evening news."
Margaret agreed, and was privately relieved. She had never liked being looked at, and the idea of her face on television, attached to words she had not chosen, made her uneasy in a way the courtroom never had. In a courtroom, at least, there were rules, and a judge, and a chance to finish a sentence.
The club, for its part, closed ranks around her in its own fashion. Cole Bennett took to sitting near the door in the afternoons, polite but immovable, and Jax fielded the telephone with a cheerfulness that gave nothing away. "Mrs. Bell isn't available for comment," he would say, as if he had been saying it all his life, "but the coffee's hot if you're passing through." Most reporters, faced with a smiling young man in a leather vest offering coffee and no information, drifted away.