The clerk wheels in the AV cart, and the courtroom’s lights soften to a courthouse twilight. A low whir from the projector fans turns the air warm and papery. I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth and taste metal and coffee gone cold. The judge nods to Tamsin; the file tree blooms on the screen like a clean outline of harm.
“Your Honor,” defense says, half-standing. “We object to the playback as unduly prejudicial. The voice will inflame sympathy. The transcript suffices.”
I catch his choice of word—inflame—and picture donors laughing in salons curated like museums, where toasts arrive live-captioned for accessibility branding, not for care. Mara was never invited into those rooms.
Tamsin doesn’t turn. “The record is probative on reliance,” she says. “The escrow proof is filed; the Court unsealed limited portions this morning.”
He spreads his hands toward the jury like a weatherman shooing rain. “We ask to keep audio sealed. Print alone is cleaner.”
The judge’s gavel rests, unneeded. “We are not staging an opera, counsel. We are hearing evidence.” She looks over her lenses at him. “Objection to audio as ‘prejudicial sympathy’ is overruled. The jury will consider voice and transcript together.”
Defense objects to “prejudicial sympathy”; overruled. The projector’s blue brightens; the screen snaps to the first slide.
The header reads: Deposition — M. Finch (Unsealed Excerpts). Beneath, the date and the court reporter’s code. I feel the old instinct rise—the one my mother taught me in hospital corridors—protect the person, protect the record—and I tuck my wrists under the table edge so no one sees my hands close.
“Play,” the judge says.
Mara’s voice enters the room like careful rain. No quaver. No apology. Just diction learned from podcasts and a childhood of reading bills with a parent. “Name, Mara Finch. I am nineteen.” The transcript scrolls in measured lines, monospace font marching like small soldiers.
“Who pays your rent?” Tamsin’s voice, steady.
“A stipend comes monthly,” Mara says on the recording. “It routes through a mailbox account and a shell that changes names. But the memo line is consistent: ‘continuation of care—do not 1099.’”
The jury’s pens start, not frantic, just mechanical—ink scratching like a dozen small insects. I watch the civics teacher in seat three trace each word with her eyes as if she could drag the facts deeper by force.
“Do you rely on those funds for housing and medication?” on the audio.
“Yes.”
“Can you pay rent without them?”
A half-beat pause on the recording, the sound of someone swallowing. “No.”
The transcript shows the same word, square and spare: No.
The projector shifts to the exhibit camera. The rent receipt blooms, large as a billboard, pixels sharp enough to count the dots inside the letters. In the bottom-right corner, the rook watermark—a tiny chess piece, the same geometry that lives in metal on Julian’s cufflinks and in the etched doorknob at The Foundry—glows under the lens like a brand.
Heat rises behind my eyes, then settles back down where it belongs: in the file, on the record, not on my face.
Defense clears his throat. “Your Honor, may we have a limiting instruction that the watermark is not a foundation logo—”
“Overruled,” the judge says before he finishes. “The jury will hear testimony on origin.”
The recording continues. Paper rustles in the deposition room; even here, months later, the mic catches it. “Ms. Finch,” Tamsin says on the tape, “what does the watermark signify to you?”
“It matches the stamp on my intake rider.” Her voice stays level. “Same rook. Same initials.”
The transcript scrolls. In the body text: ‘J. R.’ initialed rider, cash clinic policy. My jaw sets to keep from breaking a smile or a sob. Pride arrives as a physical thing and sits between my ribs like a steadying hand.
“Do you know the individual behind the account named on your rent receipts?” Tamsin asks on the audio.
“I know who directed it,” Mara says. “His assistant said, ‘We’ll route it so it doesn’t trigger anything.’”
“Trigger what?”
“Oversight.”
The room does not move. The projector fan hums; a juror clears his nose, embarrassed for the noise; the guard shifts boot weight. The smell of old varnish and someone’s cedar cologne threads through the HVAC, underscored by the faint ozone tang that always sneaks in when the hallway door opens between witnesses. The jury reads silently; the room hears every breath.
Tamsin clicks to a second document: the rider from the cash clinic, initials printed black as a bruise. “Please read the confidentiality clause highlighted.”
On the audio, Mara reads: “Beneficiary agrees not to disclose the existence of this stipend to any party whose relationship to the payor could be construed as dependency under relevant instruments.” She pauses. “I was told it protects the mission.”
The transcript catches the pause in brackets. The jurors’ heads tilt in near unison, a murmuration of skepticism without sound.
I glance across the well. Julian keeps his eyes on his notebook the way a person stares through glass at a lake without seeing water. His cufflink rook is turned inward now, a groomed piece hiding its face. Julian does not look at me. He does not look at the screen. He writes a line, then erases it with the side of his thumb.
Tamsin’s voice—deposition-day Tamsin—asks, “Did anyone threaten to cut the stipend if you became a ‘qualifying dependent’ under a trust?”
“Yes,” Mara’s audio says. “The word ‘qualifying’ was their word.”
“Whose?”
“A trustee, a man named Hale. He called it a ‘purity threshold.’”
I taste copper. The rook on the screen is a tiny, smug tower. The lake outside, imagined through the high courthouse window, has dropped another chalk shade under the dam schedule; somewhere a shoreline stone wakes dry and shows its weather line.
Defense rises. “We renew our objection and move to strike the word ‘purity’ as inflammatory.”
“Denied,” the judge says. “It is the witness’s account.”
Tamsin raises her hand for the tech. “Roll to page twelve.”
Page twelve is the bank record summary: amounts consistent, dates stalking the calendar like clock teeth. Medication outlays, rent line items, the memo repeating that warning—do not 1099—as if taxes could be a moral stain on what was always about control.
The judge turns to the jury. “You are instructed that the question before you involves definitions within the trust and whether payments create ‘financial reliance.’ You will not speculate beyond what the record supports.”
I look at the timeline in the lower right corner of the slide. The month Mara turned eighteen; the month the rider updated to keep the pharmacy off insurance; the month the Foundation pushed out a podcast arguing that true autonomy means refusing reproductive obligations. The months stack like transparent slides, the images aligning until a picture appears you cannot unsee.
On the audio, Mara breathes once. “I don’t want to be anyone’s story,” she says. “But I want my rent paid, and I want my meds.”
The transcript renders it with the same economy that saved me: I want my meds.
I listen for pity in the room and hear none. What lives here is attention. The civics teacher’s pen stops moving; her eyes don’t.
Defense tries a new route. “Your Honor, we request a sidebar on scope—”
The judge shakes her head. “No sidebar. Ask your questions on cross when it’s your turn.”
We move to the short video clip—the one recorded in the rented conference room for cadence, not for show. The lens captures Mara’s hands, not her face, by agreement. Her fingers are ink-stained; a campus ID lanyard peeks into frame and then disappears. She taps the rider’s corner. “This made me quiet,” she says. “She,”—meaning me, and I lower my lashes to carry that without dropping it—“said I could stay quiet and still be safe.”
The clip ends. The tech freezes the frame on the rook watermark, and in the lensed heat of the projector the rook takes on a dull sheen, like a signet pressed into sealing wax.
Tamsin stands. “Your Honor, we move to admit Exhibit Q—rent receipts with watermark—and Exhibit R—clinic rider with initials—as now unsealed in part.”
“Admitted,” the judge says. “So ordered.”
I track the jurors as the admission settles: a tight jaw unclenches; a lip curls in intellectual disgust, not at Mara but at the design. The practical eyes we fought to seat do what they promised: they match timestamp to motive.
Defense leans back with his chin tipped, performing boredom for the box. “No questions on the deposition,” he says, too light by half.
“That would be a first for you,” the judge tells him, drawing a breath of muffled laughter from the gallery that she kills with a glance.
Tamsin touches the corner of the table; her knuckle brushes mine. “We protected her,” she whispers.
I nod once. “Now we prove the clause.”
The judge turns to the jury. “You may take a brief recess before the next witness. Do not discuss the case.”
The lights come up a notch. The projector fan winds down with a sigh that seems relieved to have done the honest work of showing, not spinning. The room’s smells reassert: old lacquer, a ghost of floor cleaner, someone’s wool coat damp from the lake air. Through the high glass, the sky is a color that isn’t a color yet—lake-gray that will choose blue or iron later, depending on the dam.
I stand and stretch without stretching, the micro-movements my back demands. Julian caps his pen and slides it into the spine of his notebook, neat as a pharmacy tech shelving vials. He still doesn’t look up. The rook on his cuff is dull metal again, no glow by nature, only by projector.
In the hallway, the bench is crowded with people pretending to check texts. A woman I don’t know meets my eye with a tiny nod—the sort of nod you give a nurse who found your vein on the first try. I sit and drink two swallows of water that tastes like tin and the cleaning tablets they use to keep courthouse fountains from going green.
Tamsin joins me with a tablet, her finger moving through a checklist. “Escrow letter is in the record,” she says. “Advisor next.”
“Chair?” I ask.
“Chair,” she says. “We leave them no room to say this was rogue charity.”
I think about the HOA listserv, today’s subject line still sitting unread in my phone: Child-neutral winter amenities brainstorm. The same neighbors who police strollers for “clutter” will read headlines about this case and call it a distraction from civic virtue. I breathe and let the thought pass through me like wind through cedar slats.
Mara’s voice lingers in my head, the way the lake holds light after sunset. She didn’t tremble. She didn’t perform. She just named what kept her alive, and the contract that tried to make her existence a liability on a man’s balance sheet.
We go back in. The jury files, paper backs crackling softly. The rook watermark remains on the screen for a moment like an afterimage, then disappears as the tech resets.
I catch Julian’s profile as he sits. He keeps his gaze fixed on the far wall where the paint thins behind a coat hook, an intentional defect any UX researcher would have flagged and any donor would have paid to resurface. He doesn’t turn. He doesn’t reach for me or the screen or even his counsel’s elbow. He is a tower that refuses to acknowledge the water at its base is rising.
I end with a question I carry to the edge of my tongue and leave there like a tide mark: When the advisory chair takes the stand and the definitions fold back on themselves, will the jury hear the design behind the dependence—or will they let the rook pass for architecture instead of control?