Chapter 126: The Practice Questions
Adaeze held the rehearsal in the trust's small conference room, on the final Saturday of recess, with the blinds drawn.
Vera arrived forty minutes early, in the navy jacket, holding her notebook in front of her like a passport.
Adaeze made her put it in her bag.
Not yet, she said. Props are for the second act.
A witness stand is a chair, she told Vera. That is all the furniture it is. The terror is not in the chair. The terror is in the story you think you have to tell.
Vera sat across from her with her hands folded so tight the knuckles went pale.
She had faced down a scammer with index cards. She had faced Detective Park with forty years of ink.
The word testify made her twelve years old again.
I was in a courtroom once, she said. Once was enough.
That was a deposition, Adaeze said. Small room, no robes. I read the transcript. You were excellent.
I was sick for a week after.
You were excellent, Adaeze repeated, and sick for a week after. Both things are true. Neither cancels the other.
I sat in the corner with the tea things and said nothing. That was my job.
The case had been my job for weeks. This Saturday I was Vera's.
Adaeze ran it like a scrimmage. Questions, then the same questions meaner, then the silence drill, which was the hardest one.
The silence drill was this: Adaeze asked a question and then did nothing.
Vera had to let the answer sit, finished, without adding one word to defend it.
It is the pause that undoes honest people, Adaeze said.
Liars rehearse answers. Honest people rehearse apologies. Do not rehearse an apology.
She failed it six times running.
On the seventh, she answered, closed her mouth, and survived the pause.
Again, said Adaeze.
By the tenth time, Vera was enjoying it. You could watch her discover that a finished answer is a wall, not a door.
Owen stopped by at noon with sandwiches and left before he could become a presence.
He is good at leaving well.
They will ask about the money, Adaeze said. The two hundred thousand. They will try to make you the woman who hid a debt.
I am the woman who hid a debt, Vera said.
You are the woman who is paying one, Adaeze said. Documented. Monthly. Fourteen payments current, each one made from honest work.
When they show the room who you were, you will show the room the ledger.
Vera checked her folded hands before speaking.
What if I cry? she asked.
Then cry, said Adaeze. Tears are not an argument. The ledger is the argument.
Then she said, Grant's lawyers once told me never to volunteer anything.
Adaeze smiled for the first time all afternoon.
Mrs. Wexler, she said, you will not be volunteering. You will be testifying. The difference is that this time someone wants the whole truth, including the parts that cost you.
At the door, Vera stopped. She looked at the conference table, the empty chair, the pitcher of water sweating on its tray.
Why are you doing this for me? she asked. Both of you. I was not kind to your family. I was not kind to you.
I thought about lying to her. It would have been easier.
You are doing something for me, I said. Monday, under oath, you are going to tell the truth about who I am. Nobody else alive can tell it from your chair.
She held my eyes for a long moment.
Then she nodded once, like a woman closing an account.
Monday came the way Mondays do when you have circled them, too fast and far too slow.
The courtroom filled the same way it had three weeks earlier. Press row. Sketch artist. Garrett in his suit, looking smaller in it now.
The judge took the bench, set his glasses in place, and nodded to Adaeze.
Adaeze stood.
The trustee calls Vera Wexler, she said.
And Vera rose.