Tamsin’s war room smells like dry paper and cedar shavings, a clean antidote to the ozone tang I carried in from the lake. The corkboard eats an entire wall. When I stand back, the pushpins and red thread and labels become a constellation that finally matches the sky I’ve been mapping inside my head.
“Don’t read it,” Tamsin says, tapping the board with the butt of her fountain pen. “See it.”
“I see it,” I say, but my mouth is cotton. My fingers buzz like I drank a donor salon’s bad champagne on an empty stomach.
She places three printouts in front of me, the paper warm from the machine. “Triplicate,” she says, a little proud. “Chain-of-custody’s love language.”
I touch the top page. The subject line glows without light: Ensure no qualifying dependence until forty—brand and board alignment. The highlight is a quiet scream.
“Again,” she says, pointing to the corkboard. “Walk it.”
I start at the upper left—my photo of the cracked shower glass, the bead of water frozen mid-fall, the filename I read into my phone so I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t. Down to the bracelet email header chain, the route through his admin, the timestamp lined up with the dam schedule readout Tamsin insisted we pull for that morning—proof that I was home when the alert hit, because the lake was low and the shoreline logs show it like a clock.
“Minimal words,” she says. “Let the numbers talk. Juries like verbs but they trust nouns.”
I point at the rider with Mara’s initials, then the rent receipt stamped with that rook watermark—a brand playing chess with a teenager’s life. Thread jumps from there to the board minutes, redlined at 12:04 PM with “mission purity” and “variables.” I end at the email: brand and board.
“Again,” she says.
“You’re mean,” I say.
“I’m an instrument,” she says. “Answer only what was asked.”
“Answer only what was asked,” I repeat, and my tongue learns the feel of it the way a swimmer learns the lake’s thermoclines—cold bands that tell you when to brace.
She clicks a remote. The monitors along the far wall blink alive. Our “jury of screens” lines up like a row of observant faces: left monitor, a timeline of thumbnails and timestamps, no captions; middle, a clean overlay with only dates, times, hashes; right, a paused video: the donor breakfast still where the process server’s envelope kisses linen beside a quinoa bowl. The auto-caption at the bottom reads: Calder v. Rook et al. No adjectives, no music. Just gravity.
“Say it,” Tamsin says. “The short way.”
“We obtained Exhibit 12-B under subpoena,” I say. “We authenticated metadata. We printed three times. We bagged and sealed.”
“Good,” she says, mouth a straight line I now read as pleasure. “Again, slower.”
I repeat it, slower. My voice stops trying to be likable and becomes a tool.
—micro-hook—
“Now practice ‘I don’t know,’” she says.
“I hate that one,” I say.
“That one saves lives,” she says, and she moves to the corkboard like a surgeon scrubbing in. “Defense will invite you to decorate your answers. Don’t redecorate their house. If you don’t know, you don’t know.”
“What if I suspect?” I ask.
“Then you don’t know,” she says. “And if you want to say more, don’t.”
I nod. The tin taste of adrenaline finds the back of my tongue. Outside the window, the glacial lake shows its pale ring, a throat line around the shoreline. The dam must have opened at dawn; the level’s carried that clipped, administrative lowering I can feel in my knees.
Tamsin’s paralegal wheels in a cart of exhibit sleeves and two sealed evidence bags, the plastic gleaming like raincoats. She holds up a Sharpie. “Positions?”
“General,” Tamsin says. “Then surgical.”
We move like a small orchestra. I slide printouts into sleeves while Tamsin arranges monitors by order of attack. The paralegal labels spines in a narrow, perfect hand. The room’s rhythm turns my panic into cadence—sleeve, slide, snap; click, scroll, stop. I stop counting the exhibits and start counting breaths.
“Answer only what was asked,” I say to the sleeve’s small click.
“Again,” Tamsin says, eyes on the timeline. “Make it a reflex.”
“Answer only what was asked,” I say. “When true, say ‘I don’t know.’”
“When asked to guess?” she says.
“Decline,” I say. “I’m not a weather app. I’m a witness.”
The paralegal smiles without teeth. “Wish juries could hear that line.”
“They’ll hear it when she holds her breath,” Tamsin says. “They’ll watch restraint and call it credible.”
I glance at the rook chess piece on the cabinet handle—a little wink from the furniture vendor Julian insisted on during the renovations. I used to like the cleverness. Today it looks like an apology he never made.
“Okay,” Tamsin says, clapping her hands once. “Documentary mode.”
She dims the overheads. The monitors do the lighting. The left screen runs a slow pan over the server rack photos from the pantry—the night I found the hidden door, the screenshot thumbnails like tiny windows. The middle shows a simple vertical line labeled with days like sparse branches: bracelet email, audit knock, donor breakfast, motion to seal, discovery day. No adjectives. Dates and times only. The right screen holds still on the email header panel, the row of Received entries like a little DNA helix marching us from there to here.
“It’s beautiful,” I say, unexpected and too honest.
“It’s admissible,” she corrects, but her voice softens.
—micro-hook—
“Now,” she says, “we practice traps.”
I sit. The chair’s vinyl is cool through my sweater. She takes the opposing chair and becomes another species—defense counsel with an expensive watch and no patience.
“Ms. Calder,” she says in a voice that could slice deli-thin ham. “Isn’t it true that you hate your husband’s mission?”
I breathe. “I don’t know his mission. I know his conduct.”
“You’ve criticized his ‘Childfree Cities’ pledge,” she says.
“Not in this courtroom,” I say. “I’m here about specific documents and actions.”
Tamsin nods, drops the defense mask. “Better. Let the judge love you for staying in your lane.”
Again she becomes defense. “Isn’t it true you plotted to entrap Mr. Rook by manipulating a vulnerable young woman?”
The rook on the cabinet gleams at the word entrap. I keep my mouth from kicking. “No. I offered neutral help and secured independent support so she could speak safely. See Exhibit 9-C.”
She raises a brow. “Isn’t that spin?”
“It’s a receipt,” I say, and I tap the middle monitor where the escrow wire shows a bank name that never touched the Rook Foundation.
“Good,” she says, shucking the mask again. “And if you don’t remember a date?”
“I say I don’t know,” I say. “Or I ask to see the document.”
“Never volunteer,” she says. “Never decorate.”
The paralegal replaces an empty toner. The whir sounds like a small plane turning over. My stomach interprets it as turbulence and then calms when no lift follows.
“Last drill,” Tamsin says. “The lie question.”
She writes it on the whiteboard, her pen squeaking like a tiny violin: Have you supported any qualifying dependents in the past two years?
My throat answers before my brain. “That’s for him.”
“Correct,” she says. “But it’s for us, too. When he says ‘No’—”
“If,” I say.
“When,” she says, a gambler who’s memorized the dealer. “When he says ‘No,’ we trigger the sting.”
She nods to the paralegal, who opens a banker’s box and pulls out a red envelope. The label is block-printed like a fire alarm: If he denies.
I reach for it, then stop. “What’s inside?”
“Everything we can lawfully show without unsealing what we promised to protect,” Tamsin says. “Your smart-home preview, the rider with initials, the rent receipt with the rook watermark, and the metadata alignment that pins his email to Hale inside the exact window of those payments.”
“No minors’ names,” the paralegal adds. “No addresses. No clinic identifiers. Only what the judge allowed.”
Tamsin places the envelope upright on the table between us like a third person with perfect posture. “This doesn’t leave the room,” she says. “It travels with me to court and stays sealed unless the exact predicate is met.”
“The predicate is the question on the board,” I say.
“And the answer ‘No,’” she says, gentle and merciless.
—micro-hook—
The room’s light returns; the monitors dim. I scroll the overlay one last time, the thin gray bars lining up across my life like fret markers on a guitar I’m learning to play under pressure.
“What about tone,” I ask, “when I say ‘I don’t know’?”
“Neutral,” Tamsin says. “We save heat for closing. Your job is to be a clean glass.”
I picture the shower panel at home, the hairline crack like a note I keep re-reading. “Clean glass breaks,” I say.
“Tempered glass holds until it doesn’t,” she says. “You’ll hold. If you feel a break, breathe. Judges can smell panic.”
I nod. The HOA listserv pings my phone in my bag—Reminder: Donor preview tonight at the museum annex; live-captioned toasts begin at seven. A second ping: Sidewalk stroller policy enforced next week. Lakeview Heights loves a policy. Lakeview Heights worships captions.
“Ignore it,” Tamsin says without looking. “We’re writing our own captions.”
“Minimal words,” I say.
“Maximal truth,” she says. “Brevity is how we win when the facts are our friends.”
The paralegal passes me a stack of blank notecards. “Write three questions you fear most,” she says. “Then write the shortest truthful answer.”
I write: Why didn’t you leave earlier? I answer: Because I was collecting proof.
I write: Do you want his money? I answer: I want boundaries enforced.
I write: Are you using pregnancy to win? I answer: I’m protecting a life from a contract.
Tamsin reads them, nods once. “Keep those in your pocket,” she says. “They’re ballast.”
We run the drill again. “Answer only what was asked,” she calls.
“Answer only what was asked,” I answer.
“When true,” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say, and this time the words don’t taste like failure; they taste like water.
The corkboard’s constellation steadies in my peripheral vision. The rook knob on the cabinet stops looking like threat and becomes a compass—north toward receipts.
Tamsin picks up the red envelope. She holds it like a violin case. “Last thing,” she says. “The sting feels good, but we don’t chase it. We don’t need drama; we need daylight.”
“Daylight, not décor,” I say, and she lets herself grin.
“Ready?” she asks.
I look at the lake’s pale ring through the window and the spare, captioned story on our screens. I grip the back of the chair and feel the texture under my palm—tiny crosshatches like pixels. I picture the jury looking from me to the timeline to the rider, across that simple line of days like a walk beside water.
“Ready,” I say.
She tucks the red envelope into a slim brief. The click of the clasp is the exact sound of a bead of water releasing from glass.
I end with a question I file in my chest beside the word predicate: When the question lands and the room hushes, will his mouth choose the truth that saves him—or the lie that opens our envelope and finally lets the room see what we’ve seen all along?