“These things you’ve told us about, they bothered you, but not so much that you broke off your friendship with Jacob?”

“No.”

“In fact, you two continued to be friends for days and even weeks after the murder, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t it true that you even went to Jacob’s house after the murder?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s fair to say that you weren’t too sure at the time that Jacob really was the murderer?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Because you wouldn’t want to remain friends with a murderer, of course?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Even after you posted that message on Facebook where you accused Jacob of the murder, you still remained friends with him? You still remained in contact, still hung around?”

“Yes.”

“Were you ever afraid of Jacob?”

“No.”

“Did he ever threaten or intimidate you in any way? Or lose his temper at you?”

“No.”

“Isn’t it true that it was your parents who told you you couldn’t stay with friends with Jacob, that you never decided to stop being friends with Jacob?”

“Kind of.”

Jonathan backed off, sensing Derek beginning to hedge, and he moved to a new topic. “The day of the murder, you said you saw Jacob before school and again in English class right after school started?”

“Yes.”

“But there was no indication that he had been involved in any kind of struggle?”

“No.”

“No blood?”

“Just the little spot on his hand.”

“No scratches, no torn clothes, nothing like that? No mud?”

“No.”

“In fact, it never even occurred to you, looking at Jacob in English class that morning, that he might have been involved in anything on the way to school?”

“No.”

“When you later came to the conclusion that Jacob might have committed the murder, as you’ve suggested here, did you take that into account? That after a bloody, fatal knife attack, Jacob somehow emerged without a drop of blood on him, without so much as a scratch? Did you think about that, Derek?”

“Kind of.”

“Kind of?”

“Yes.”

“You said Ben Rifkin was a bigger kid than Jacob, bigger and tougher?”

“Yes.”

“But still Jacob came out of this struggle without a mark on him?”

Derek did not answer.

“Now, you said something about Jacob grinning when the lockdown was announced. Did other kids grin? Is it natural enough for a kid to grin when there’s excitement, when you’re nervous?”

“Probably.”

“It’s just something kids do sometimes.”

“I guess.”

“Now, the knife you saw, Jacob’s knife. Just to be clear, you have no idea whether that was the knife that was used in the murder?”

“No.”

“And Jacob never said anything to you about intending to use the knife on Ben Rifkin, because of the bullying?”

“Intending? No, he didn’t say that.”

“And when he showed the knife to you, it never occurred to you that he planned to kill Ben Rifkin? Because if it did, you would have done something about it, right?”

“I guess.”

“So, as far as you knew, Jacob never had a plan to kill Ben Rifkin?”

“A plan? No.”

“Never talked about when or how he was going to kill Ben Rifkin?”

“No.”

“Then, later, he just sent you the story?”

“Yeah.”

“He sent you a link by email, you said?”

“Yes.”

“Did you save that email?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It didn’t seem smart. I mean, for Jake-from Jacob’s point of view.”

“So you deleted the email because you were protecting him?”

“I guess.”

“Can you tell me, of all the details in that story, was there anything that was new to you, anything you didn’t already know either from the Web or from news stories or from other kids talking?”

“No, not really.”

“The knife, the park, the three stab wounds-that was all well known by then, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Hardly a confession, then, is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“And did he say in the email that he’d written the story? Or just found it?”

“I don’t remember exactly what the email said. I think it was just, like, ‘Dude, check this out’ or something like that.”

“But you’re sure Jacob told you he wrote the story, not that he just read it?”

“Pretty sure.”

“ Pretty sure?”

“Pretty sure, yeah.”

Jonathan went on in this way for some time, doing what he could, shaving away and shaving away at Derek Yoo’s testimony, scoring what points he could. Who knows what the jurors were really making of it. All I can tell you is that the half dozen jurors who were furiously taking notes during Derek’s direct testimony had put down their pens now. Some were no longer even looking at him; they had dropped their eyes to their laps. Maybe Jonathan had won the day and they had decided to discount Derek’s testimony entirely. But it did not seem that way. It seemed like I had been fooling myself, and for the first time I began to imagine in realistic terms what it would be like when Jacob was in Concord prison.

Driving home from court that day I was morose, and my sadness infected Jacob and Laurie. From the start, I had been the steady one. It upset them, I think, to see me lose hope. I tried to lie for them. I said all the usual things about not feeling too up on a good day or too down on a bad day; about how the prosecution’s evidence always looks worse on first sight than it does later, in the context of the whole case; about how juries are impossible to anticipate and we should not read too much into their every little gesture. But my tone gave me away. I thought we had probably lost the case that day. At a minimum, the damage was enough that we would have to present a real defense. It would be foolish to rely on “reasonable doubt” at this point: the story Jacob had written about the murder read like a confession, and try as he might, Jonathan could not disprove Derek’s testimony that Jacob wrote it. I did not admit any of this. There was nothing to gain by telling the truth, so I didn’t. All I said to them was that “It wasn’t a good day.” But that was enough.

Father O’Leary did not appear to watch over us that night, or anyone else. We Barbers were left in complete isolation. If we had been shot out into space, we could not have felt more alone. We ordered Chinese food, as we had a thousand times the last few months, because China City delivers and the driver speaks so little English that we did not have to feel self-conscious opening the door for him. We ate our boneless spare ribs and General Gao’s chicken in near silence, then slunk off to opposite corners of the house for the evening. We were too sick of the case to talk about it anymore but too obsessed with it to talk about anything else. We were too gloomy for the idiocies of TV-suddenly our lives seemed finite, and much too short to waste-and too distracted to read.

Around ten, I went into Jacob’s room to check on him. He lay on his back on the bed.

“You okay, Jacob?”

“Not really.”

I went over and sat on the side of the bed. He hoisted his butt over to make room, but Jake was getting so big there was hardly enough space for both of us. (He used to lie right on my chest for naps when he was a baby. He had been no bigger than a loaf of bread.)

He rolled onto his side and propped his head on his hand. “Dad, can I ask you something? If you thought things were looking bad, like the case was about to go the wrong way, would you tell me?”

“Why?”

“No, not ‘why’; just, would you tell me?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Because it wouldn’t make sense to-well, if I took off, what would happen to you and Mom?”

“We’d lose all our money.”

“They’d take away the house?”

“Eventually. We put it up as security on your bail.”

He considered this.

“It’s just a house,” I told him. “I wouldn’t miss it. It doesn’t matter as much as you.”