جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 4

MARCUSThree years is enough time to memorize every crack in a ceiling.I could tell you exactly how many there were above my bunk, exactly which one branched into two smaller cracks like a river forking around an island, exactly how the light from the hallway hit it at eleven each night before the guards killed the lamps for good. I had counted them so many times that counting them had become the only thing that felt like mine anymore.Everything else belonged to someone else now. My name belonged to headlines that used it in the same sentence as murderer. My company belonged to my brother, who I'd handed it to on a silver platter the day I decided prison was easier to survive than watching him sit behind my desk. My wife belonged to him too, in the technical sense that mattered to a judge, though nothing about her had ever really stopped belonging to me, not in the sense that mattered to me.And my daughter.I didn't know her name for a long time. Liv had made sure of that, standing

OLIVIAThe lawyer's office smelled like old carpet and burnt coffee, and the woman behind the desk, a small sharp faced attorney named Patricia Alvarez who'd handled the original case with the DA's office and now consulted privately for us, didn't waste time on pleasantries."So here's where we are," Patricia said, sliding a folder across the desk that I didn't open. "The appeal isn't challenging the conviction outright. It's more surgical than that. His new attorney, guy named Roland Fitch, he's arguing that two pieces of physical evidence from the summer house were mishandled during collection, and that your statement, specifically the parts describing what happened before Ethan arrived, can't be considered fully reliable because you were unconscious or semiconscious for stretches of that time.""I was awake enough to remember him telling me he was taking me somewhere until I gave birth," I said. "I remember that part just fine.""I believe you. The court might too. But Fitch doesn'