Chapter 8
The trial, when it came eight months later, was shorter than anyone expected, mostly because the evidence left very little room for a defense beyond mitigating the sentence.
Evelyn testified for a little over an hour. She described the cutter, the six minutes, the flat rehearsed story about gym class, the half-second where Marissa's mask had slipped in the hospital room. The defense attorney tried, briefly and without much conviction, to suggest that a former nurse turned babysitter had overstepped her role and jumped to conclusions.
"Ma'am," Evelyn said, when he pushed on that point a second time, "I have watched hundreds of children come through an ER with injuries their guardians swore were accidents. I know the difference between a scared kid and a coached one. I'd stake my license on it, if I still had one to stake. I'm staking it on this instead."
The jury deliberated for six hours. Marissa Vale was convicted on charges of attempted murder, child endangerment, and aggravated assault of a minor, tied to both the incident at the park and the deliberate contamination of the wound. The judge, in sentencing, specifically noted the "chilling, methodical planning" behind a scheme built to look like a series of unfortunate accidents, and the fact that it had been stopped only by the vigilance of someone with no legal obligation to intervene at all.
Daniel didn't attend the sentencing hearing. He was, at the exact hour it happened, sitting on the floor of Noah's bedroom helping him build a model dinosaur, because Noah had asked, that morning, if they could do something that had nothing to do with court, and Daniel had decided — with an ease that surprised him, after a year of getting these calls wrong — that his son's request mattered more than his own need for closure.
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He got the verdict by text message from Denise Okafor. He read it once, set the phone face-down on the carpet, and went back to fitting a small plastic femur into place while Noah narrated an elaborate and entirely inaccurate history of the Jurassic period.
Some victories, he was learning, didn't need to be witnessed to be real.
