Rebecca called once more that evening, briefly, not to rehearse but to reassure, and she told me to sleep if I could, to eat in the morning, to wear something I felt comfortable standing in, and to answer only the question asked, even if a longer answer felt more complete. I thanked her, and I meant it, because she had carried the legal weight of this case without ever making me feel like a case file, and because she had defended the boundary around Amara as fiercely as she had defended any document. Pierce had sent a short note through Rebecca as well, confirming the order of witnesses for the first day and confirming that Detective Hayes would be present, and I read that note twice, not because it contained anything surprising, but because its plainness steadied me. There would be no surprises in the morning that preparation had not already anticipated, and there would be no need for me to improvise, because improvisation, in a courtroom, is where honest witnesses get into trouble. I folded the note into my folder, beside the duplicate minutes Alice had shared and the notices I had kept from the beginning, and I laid the folder by the front door so I would not forget it in the morning rush. Then I walked through the house, turning off lights, checking locks, doing the ordinary things that make a house feel safe at night, and I paused once more at the front window, looking out at the driveway where the BMW sat under the streetlight, its blue paint darkened to something deeper by the night, and I felt, for the first time in a long while, not anger at what had been done to us, and not triumph at what had been corrected, but a quiet readiness for what came next, a readiness to step into the courtroom and let the record speak, and to come home afterwards and make dinner, and to keep going, one honest day at a time, until the story of Cypress Pointe Lane belonged, once again, to the people who actually lived there.
The morning of the trial I woke before my alarm, and for a long time I just lay there listening to the house settle around me, listening for Amara moving in her room down the hall, listening for the ordinary sounds that had carried us through the last few years since Maya died. I had ironed my shirt the night before, a plain dark suit I had bought for job interviews years ago and almost never worn, and I had laid out my tie on the dresser beside a photograph of Maya smiling on our old porch. I did not pray out loud, not exactly, but I stood in the kitchen with a mug of coffee gone cold in my hand and I thought about everything that had brought us to this day, about a car parked in a driveway where it had every right to be, about a rule that had never existed until someone needed it to exist, about a piece of paper signed and dated to make a lie look like history. Amara came downstairs in her school dress, the one she saves for days that matter, and she hugged me around the waist the way she did when she was small, except now her head nearly reached my chin and her hug had a steadiness in it that made my throat tighten. She told me she was proud of me, and she told me she was not scared anymore, and I believed her because I could see it in the way she held herself, shoulders back, eyes clear, no longer flinching at the sound of a truck on our street. We drove to the courthouse together in the Portimao Blue BMW, because Rebecca Hart had said it would be good for me to arrive in my own car, on my own terms, and because Amara had asked if we could, and I wanted her to remember that we had not hidden it away or apologized for owning it. The blue paint caught the morning light as we pulled into the lot, and for a second I thought of all the mornings I had washed that car in the driveway at 12 Cypress Pointe Lane, Maya handing me towels, Amara perched on the curb with a sponge too big for her hands, and I thought of how a thing as simple as a car in a driveway could become a test of whether a man would stand his ground or let himself be pushed out of his own home.