Bingo.

“Lacy,” Selena said. “Do you mind holding him while I look for something in my bag?”

Lacy lifted her gaze. “You…you don’t mind?”

Selena shook her head and transferred the baby to her lap. Sam stared up at Lacy, diligently trying to fit his fist in his mouth. “Gah,” he said.

A smile ghosted across Lacy’s face. “Little man,” she whispered, and she shifted the baby so that she could hold him more firmly.

“Excuse me?”

Selena turned to see the door crack open and Alex Cormier’s face peek inside. She immediately stood up. “Your Honor, you can’t come in-”

“Let her,” Lacy said.

Selena stepped back as the judge walked into the room and sat down beside Lacy. She put a Styrofoam cup on the table and reached out, smiling a little as Sam grabbed onto her pinky finger and tugged on it. “The coffee here is awful, but I brought you some anyway.”

“Thanks.”

Selena moved gingerly behind the stacks of maps until she was standing behind the two women, watching them with the same stunned curiosity she’d have shown if a lioness cozied up to an impala instead of eating it.

“You did well in there,” the judge said.

Lacy shook her head. “I didn’t do well enough.”

“She won’t ask you much on cross, if anything.”

Lacy lifted the baby to her chest and stroked his back. “I don’t think I can go back in there,” she said, her voice hitching.

“You can, and you will,” the judge said. “Because Peter needs you to.”

“They hate him. They hate me.”

Judge Cormier put her hand on Lacy’s shoulder. “Not everyone,” she said. “When we go back, I’m going to be sitting in the front row. You don’t have to look at the prosecutor. You just look at me.”

Selena’s jaw dropped. Often, with fragile witnesses or young children, they’d plant a person as a focal point to make testifying less scary. To make them feel that out of that whole crowd of people, they had at least one friend.

Sam found his thumb and started to suck on it, falling asleep against Lacy’s chest. Selena watched Alex reach out, stroke the dark marabou tufts of her son’s hair. “Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you’re young,” the judge said to Lacy. “But I don’t think we make any fewer when we’re grown up.”

As Jordan walked into the holding cell where Peter was being kept, he was already doing damage control. “It’s not going to hurt us,” he announced. “The judge is going to give the jury instructions to disregard that whole outburst.”

Peter sat on the metal bench, his head in his hands.

“Peter,” Jordan said. “Did you hear me? I know it looked bad, and I know it was upsetting, but legally, it isn’t going to affect your-”

“I need to tell her why I did it,” Peter interrupted.

“Your mother?” Jordan said. “You can’t. She’s still sequestered.” He hesitated. “Look, as soon as I can get you to talk to her, I-”

“No. I mean, I have to tell everyone.”

Jordan looked at his client. Peter was dry-eyed; his fists rested on the bench. When he lifted his gaze, it wasn’t the terrified face of the child he’d sat beside in court on the first day of the trial. It was someone who had grown up, overnight.

“We’re getting out your side of the story,” Jordan said. “You just have to be patient. I know this is hard to believe, but it’s going to come together. We’re doing the best we can.”

“We’re not,” Peter said. “You are.” He stood up, walking closer to Jordan. “You promised. You said it was our turn. But when you said that, you meant your turn, didn’t you? You never intended for me to get up there and tell everyone what really happened.”

“Did you see what they did to your mother?” Jordan argued. “Do you have any idea what’s going to happen to you if you get up there and sit in that witness box?”

In that instant, something in Peter broke: not his anger, and not his hidden fear, but that last spider-thread of hope. Jordan thought of the testimony Michael Beach had given, about how it looked when the life left a person’s face. You did not have to witness someone dying to see that.

“Jordan,” Peter said. “If I’m going to spend the rest of my life in jail, I want them to hear my side of the story.”

Jordan opened his mouth, intending to tell his client absolutely fucking not, he would not be taking the stand and ruining the tower of cards Jordan had created in the hope of an acquittal. But who was he kidding? Certainly not Peter.

He took a deep breath. “All right,” he said. “Tell me what you’re going to say.”

Diana Leven didn’t have any questions for Lacy Houghton, which-Jordan knew-was most likely a blessing. In addition to the fact that there wasn’t anything the prosecutor could ask her that hadn’t been covered better by Maddie Shaw’s father, he hadn’t known how much more stress Lacy could take without being rendered incomprehensible on the stand. As she was escorted from the courtroom, the judge looked up from his file. “Your next witness, Mr. McAfee?”

Jordan inhaled deeply. “The defense calls Peter Houghton.”

Behind him, there was a flurry of activity. Rustling, as reporters dug fresh pens out of their pockets and turned to a fresh page on their pads. Murmurs, as the families of the victims traced Peter’s steps to the witness stand. He could see Selena off to one side, her eyes wide at this unplanned development.

Peter sat down and stared only at Jordan, just as he’d told him to. Good boy, he thought. “Are you Peter Houghton?”

“Yes,” Peter said, but he wasn’t close enough to the microphone for it to carry. He leaned forward and repeated the word. “Yes,” he said, and this time, an unholy screech from the PA system rang through the courtroom speakers.

“What grade are you in, Peter?”

“I was a junior when I got arrested.”

“How old are you now?”

“Eighteen.”

Jordan walked toward the jury box. “Peter, are you the person who went to Sterling High School the morning of March 6, 2007, and shot and killed ten people?”

“Yes.”

“And wounded nineteen others?”

“Yes.”

“And caused damage to countless other people, and to a great deal of property?”

“I know,” Peter said.

“You’re not denying that today, are you?”

“No.”

“Can you tell the jury,” Jordan asked, “why you did it?”

Peter looked into his eyes. “They started it.”

“Who?”

“The bullies. The jocks. The ones who called me a freak my whole life.”

“Do you remember their names?”

“There are so many of them,” Peter said.

“Can you tell us why you felt you had to resort to violence?”

Jordan had told Peter that whatever he did, he could not get angry. That he had to stay calm and collected while he spoke, or his testimony would backfire on him-even more than Jordan already expected. “I tried to do what my mom wanted me to do,” Peter explained. “I tried to be like them, but that didn’t work out.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I tried out for soccer, but never got any time on the field. Once, I helped some kids play a practical joke on a teacher by moving his car from the parking lot into the gym…. I got detention, but the other kids didn’t, because they were on the basketball team and had a game on Saturday.”

“But, Peter,” Jordan said, “why this?”

Peter wet his lips. “It wasn’t supposed to end this way.”

“Did you plan to kill all those people?”

They had rehearsed this in the holding cell. All Peter had to say was what he’d said before, when Jordan had coached him. No. No I didn’t.

Peter looked down at his hands. “When I did it in the game,” he said quietly, “I won.”

Jordan froze. Peter had broken from the script, and now Jordan couldn’t find his line. He only knew that the curtain was going to close before he finished. Scrambling, he replayed Peter’s response in his mind: it wasn’t all bad. It made him sound depressed, like a loner.