Chapter 13: The Record Hardens
By the third month the record had hardened past the point of easy revision.
The medical documentation stood. The recorded threats stood. The firearm recovery stood. Attempts by the defense to introduce mutual conflict or third-party manipulation failed to find traction against the dated sequence. Garrick’s public-facing charm—still referenced by a few character letters—looked increasingly thin beside the interior evidence.
Ethan called once to say the secondary weapons trail had produced a clean additional charge. It would not transform the case by itself, but it removed another avenue for the defense to paint him as a man caught in a single overreaction.
“He’s running out of clean explanations,” Ethan said.
“He never had one,” I answered. “He only had confidence that no one would line the pieces up.”
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After the call I sat in my kitchen and reviewed the original folder—the first photographs, the first timed notes, the first decision not to confront him in the house where my mother was still wiping blood off the floor. The distance between that night and the present one was measurable in documents now, not just in memory.
That was sufficient.
