All Chapters of Ashes Of His Regret : Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

Esmeralda's POV“Seat!" Her voice thundered in the room, I had no choice but to adjust myself. Adriana Colts does not believe in gentle preparation.I understand this within the first fifteen minutes of our session. She sits across from me in the prosecution's conference room with a legal pad and the particular stillness of someone who has done this hundreds of times and has stopped finding it uncomfortable, and she looks at me and says:"I'm going to ask you questions the way Matheson & Crane will ask them. I need you to answer as if I am the enemy. Because in that room, I won't be asking. They will.""Understood," I say."Don't perform strength. Don't perform composure. Just answer the question that was asked and nothing more.""Understood.""And when I go after you and I will go after you I need you to stay exactly where you are, don't be defensive or cold, just be present.""Understood."She picks up her legal pad.And she begins.*****"Mrs. Hale. At the time of your marriage

Esmeralda's POVI go to the grave on a Wednesday.No particular reason for Wednesday except that the week is quiet in the middle and I have a two-hour gap between a Morrison meeting and a call with my attorney and I have been meaning to come for weeks. Since the acquisition. Since I put his name back at the top of a letterhead and felt the particular weight of that and didn't know where to put it.I bring flowers. White one, he always said coloured flowers at graves were for the people standing above the ground and white ones were for the person below it. I never asked him what he meant by that. I wish I had asked him more things.The cemetery is quiet.A Wednesday thing, or a grey-sky thing. The kind of day that doesn't attract visitors.I stand at the stone and I don't try to make it a speech. I've never been good at talking to people who can't answer back and he would have had no patience for performance anyway. He was a direct man. He wanted the plain thing said plainly.So I sa

Esmeralda's POVThe morning of the hearing I wake up at five and I lie still.Damien is awake beside me. I know his awake from his asleep the quality of his stillness is different. Right now he is very still in the way of someone who is being careful, giving me the space of the morning without filling it.I appreciate it more than I know how to say.So I say something else."I'm ready," I tell the ceiling."I know," he says."Not performing ready. Actually ready.""I know the difference," he says. "That's why I'm not arguing."I turn my head to look at him.He's looking at the ceiling too. Profile sharp in the early dark. The man who has been beside me through every piece of this the evidence, the arrest, the acquisition, the motions, the preparation. Who sat in my kitchen at six in the morning and read my statement before it went out. Who showed up at a courthouse he didn't need to attend because he wanted to be there."After today," I say."After today," he agrees."Whatever the

Damien's POVI am three rows back in the gallery.I chose the seat deliberately close enough to see her face, far enough that the cameras can't easily put us in the same frame. Marcus suggested the back row. I compromised. Three rows. I am not going to sit at the back of this room while Esmeralda testifies about the seven years of her life that were taken from her.She walks to the stand and she counts the steps.I notice because I know her. Because I have watched her closely enough to recognize the small things she does when she is managing the distance between what she feels and what she shows. The counting is grounding. It's something Dr. Chen suggested months ago she told me about it one evening, almost offhand, and I filed it away the way I file everything about her.Eleven steps.She sits.She is composed in a way that has nothing to do with performance.That is the thing that I want the room to understand and cannot say from this gallery seat. That her composure is not armou

Julian's POVI notice it immediately, the slight downward focus, the deliberate pace. Eleven steps from the plaintiff's table to the witness stand and she counts every one of them. It's a grounding technique. Something she learned somewhere, probably therapy, probably recently.She didn't used to need that.The woman I married walked into rooms like she owned them or didn't walk in at all. There was nothing deliberate about it… it was simply how she moved through the world. Unguarded. Open. Occupying space without calculation.The woman sitting in that witness stand is deliberate about everything.I did that.Not as a compliment to myself. As a fact.*****I keep my hands folded on the table.Richard told me this morning: *whatever you feel in that room, keep it off your face. The judge is watching you as much as the witnesses. Composure.*I am composed.What is underneath the composure is something I have no clean name for.Adriana begins.“Ms. Voss can you describe for the court t