جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 40

The continuing education course met in a building on the northwestern edge of the Feinberg campus — a newer structure with the clean, functional architecture of a place built for work rather than impression, flooded with the kind of institutional light that was harsh on everything except what you were actually trying to see.My professor was Dr. Constance Webb — no relation to Darius, a coincidence I had noted with private irony on the first day of class — who taught reproductive biochemistry with the fierce, slightly impatient energy of a woman who found the material inexhaustibly interesting and was mildly intolerant of anyone who did not.I found her inexhaustibly interesting also.The course had become, over the weeks, something I had not anticipated when I enrolled. I had expected re-familiarization — the process of returning to a field after years away, the particular humility of discovering how much had changed and how much you had forgotten. I had expected competence, eventual

Rachel and June arrived on a Friday afternoon in mid-December, two weeks before Christmas, on a flight that Patricia's office had arranged with the thoroughness that had become Patricia's standard approach to every logistical detail connected to this case and the people inside it.I met them at O'Hare.I had not planned to go to the airport. Rachel had insisted she could navigate arrivals independently — she had lived in Chicago for years, she knew the infrastructure, she didn't need to be collected like a package. I had agreed, and then at eleven-thirty in the morning I had put on my coat and driven to O'Hare anyway because some things override practical arrangements.I spotted them before they spotted me — Rachel coming through the arrivals gate with a rolling suitcase in one hand and a small person in the other. June was wearing a red coat and carrying a stuffed animal of indeterminate species and looking at O'Hare's arrivals hall with the wide, rotating attention of a four-year-ol

The Cook County criminal courthouse on California Avenue looked exactly the same in January as it had in November — the same institutional smell, the same fluorescent corridors, the same unhurried machinery of a system that processed serious things without ceremony.What was different was who was walking into it.Raymond Harmon arrived at nine-fourteen with his attorney — a man named Saul Brevetti who had the particular energy of a defense attorney managing a case he knew was unwinnable and had decided to focus his efforts on minimizing outcome rather than contesting facts. Harmon himself was smaller than I remembered. Or perhaps he had always been that size and I had built him larger in my mind during the months of assembling evidence against him — the way you build something larger when you are afraid of it, and it shrinks back to its actual dimensions when the fear is gone.He was sixty-eight years old in a gray suit with his medical career permanently suspended and a criminal pros

Rachel came back to Chicago on the last Friday of January without June — June was in Denver with Rachel's mother, apparently under the impression that Grandma's house was the superior location and that Chicago could wait until there was more snow on the ground.I picked Rachel up from Union Station — she had taken the train from Denver rather than fly, which she explained was something she did when she needed the travel time to think. Eighteen hours on an Amtrak train through the winter middle of the country, watching the landscape change through a window, arriving in Chicago ready for whatever came next rather than disoriented by the speed of flight.She looked different from the airport arrival in December.Not physically — she was the same Rachel, the same gray coat, the same quality of composure worn like clothing. But something in her face had shifted since the arraignment, since Margaret's testimony, since the winter weeks of watching the prosecution build in public. Something h

The second portrait event was not called a portrait event.It was called — in the magazine's promotional materials, in the invitation that arrived at my Lincoln Square apartment three weeks after the feature ran — An Evening of Recognition: Women in Science and Advocacy, Chicago Chapter.Harrison Wells had co-sponsored it. He had called Patricia in February to discuss the idea — a reframing of the annual Gold Coast event, a deliberate reclamation of the venue and the occasion from the narrative that had been attempted there in November. He had asked, through Patricia, whether I would be willing to attend.I had said yes before Patricia finished relaying the question.Nina helped me choose what to wear.She arrived at the Lincoln Square apartment on a Thursday evening three days before the event with an expression that indicated she had opinions and the organizational energy to execute them, which was one of the things I loved most about her.We stood in my bedroom in front of the clos