Page 113 of In the Shadows
"I can help."
"You can sit down."
She sat. Watched him move through the kitchen with the quiet efficiency she'd come to recognize—no wasted motion, everything purposeful. He found plates, found forks, and found the oven mitts she kept in the drawer by the stove.
"Wednesday," she said.
He looked at her.
"I testify on Wednesday. And then it's out of my hands. Whatever happens after that—the verdict, the sentencing, all of it—I won't be able to control any of it."
"That's true."
"It should scare me more than it does."
"Why doesn't it?"
She thought about that. About the courtroom, the stare-down with Warren, the judge's gavel coming down.
"Because I've done everything I can. Whatever happens next, I'll know that. I found the evidence. I put the pieces together. I didn't give up, even when everyone told me to." She met his eyes. "The rest is up to twelve strangers. And I have to be okay with that."
Ronan slid the casserole into the oven and set the timer.
"Thirty minutes," he said. "That's how long until dinner."
"What do we do for thirty minutes?"
"Nothing." He crossed to the couch and sat beside her. "We do nothing. We don't talk about the trial, the testimony, or Warren Caldwell. We just sit here and wait for the chicken to heat up."
"That sounds boring."
"Good." He put his arm around her shoulders. "Boring is underrated."
She leaned into him, her head against his chest, and listened to the quiet sounds of the cottage settling around them. The refrigerator humming. The oven ticking as it warmed. Somewhere outside, a car passed by, its headlights sweeping briefly across the window.
She closed her eyes.
In four days, she would sit in a witness box and tell twelve strangers about the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She would answer questions designed to trip her up, to make her doubt herself, to make the jury doubt her. She would look at Warren Caldwell and tell the truth about what he'd done.
But that was four days away.
Right now, there was just this. A warm house. The man she loved beside her. The smell of chicken and rice beginning to fill the kitchen.
She let herself have it.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ronan had watched people lie under oath before.
He'd sat through depositions and court-martials and congressional hearings where men in expensive suits said whatever they needed to say to protect themselves. He knew what deception looked like—the micro-expressions, the careful pauses, the way people's voices changed when they were constructing a story instead of remembering one.
Lila wasn't lying.
She sat in the witness box with her hands folded in her lap, her posture straight but not rigid. Sarah had coached her on this—look confident, not defensive; make eye contact with the jury, not the attorneys; speak clearly and don't rush. But what Ronan saw wasn't coaching. It was something harder to fake.
She looked like someone telling the truth because she had nothing else to offer.
"Ms. Bennett," Sarah said, standing at the podium between the witness stand and the jury box, "can you describe for the court how you first discovered the documents in your father's study?"
