Chapter 10: The Long Middle
By the third week the case had settled into the long middle that most real cases occupy—less drama, more calendar.
Hearings were set. Discovery requests were exchanged. Garrick remained in custody pending a bail argument that the firearm and the active protective order made difficult for his counsel. My mother moved into a more stable short-term rental with better security and a lease that did not require her to explain herself to anyone who knew Garrick’s name.
I returned to a closer approximation of ordinary routine. The exterior cameras still ran. The encrypted folder still received updates. But the constant, minute-by-minute readiness of the first days had eased into something more sustainable.
Ethan met me once more in the same nondescript lot.
“Defense is probing for any procedural gap they can widen,” he said. “They’re also trying to develop you as the central antagonist. So far they don’t have the FBI background. If that surfaces, the narrative shifts again—some judges give it weight, some treat it as irrelevant to the core facts. Either way, the evidence remains the evidence.”
“I’m not hiding from it,” I said. “I just don’t see the value in volunteering it before it’s necessary.”
“Same posture, then.”
He handed me a short status memo and left.
I sat in the car for a few additional minutes after he was gone, reviewing the sequence from the first bruise on the kitchen floor to the porch under the exterior lights. Garrick had entered the marriage believing charm and control would be enough. He had continued believing it right up to the moment the door opened and the hallway behind me was no longer empty.
The rest would be decided in rooms with recorders and transcripts and people who did not care how he smiled at church.
I started the engine and drove back across the city.
May you like
The case was no longer about whether he would be stopped.
It was about how completely the record would close around the life he had built on other people’s fear.
