Jury of One by David Ellis

What
should
she say?
    A knock on the door. The five-minute warning. Their time was up.
    Shelly could recall the conversation almost verbatim. Last May, before the warm weather had broken. She and Alex werewalking along the lake on a Sunday, only a short walk from Alex’s offices at McHenry Stern. She was cold and Alex had given her his long black coat.
    She didn’t know, in hindsight, why she had told him. Maybe because she had known, of all people, he would never repeat it. They didn’t share friends or run in the same circles. So he was safe. Yes, that would have been the easy way to rationalize it. But that wasn’t the truth. The truth was, she had always opened herself more to children than adults. She had few close friends, perhaps by choice. The truth was, in the four months she had known Alex up to that point, she had come to rely on the friendship as much as Alex. She’d never told anyone, other than the police, of course. She’d never told anyone and she suddenly felt the urge.
    The truth was, she wasn’t just helping Alex get his act together. She’d needed his friendship as much as he needed hers.
    I was raped when I was sixteen,
she’d told him.
    She’d told him everything. The reaction of the police. Her thoughts of abortion. The reaction of her parents. Her life afterward.
    I had the baby,
she’d said.
I gave it up for adoption and never saw it. Not then or ever again. An attorney came in, had me sign the papers, and it was over.
    And now, as she sat across from a boy who was her son, she recalled Alex’s reaction. The loss of color to his cheek, the catch in his throat when he tried to vocalize a response. She didn’t discern the subtleties then, the difference between shock and disappointment, or perhaps the mingling of the two.
    How, she wondered with the knowledge of hindsight, had that information affected Alex? When she told him of her rape last May, she was telling him he would never know his biological father. And worse. She was telling him that his birth, his very existence, was the product of a criminal act.
    It came to her now, the reason for her need to purge to him that day. That hadn’t been just any old Sunday in May. And—yes, now that she thought about it—it had been Alex’s idea to meet on Sunday. He had bought her lunch and given her a small gift, a pair of earrings. She had accepted it for what she thought it was, a gesture of appreciation for everything she had done forhim. It had never occurred to her then that it was a Mother’s Day present.
    The guard entered the room and unlocked Alex’s handcuffs from the table. Alex stood up in his handcuffs and looked briefly at Shelly before being led out of the room.

17
Plea
    J EROD R OMERO HAD a series of routine matters in court this morning. For some of the cases, prisoners in orange jumpsuits were shuffled in, joined by their defense counsel. Romero was all business, no humor, even when the judge was not on the bench.
    He finished about noon and saw Shelly as he was gathering his papers. “Ms. Trotter,” he said in his formal courtroom voice.
    “I need to know you’re protecting Alex.”
    “We are.” Romero looked at her with curiosity. “Why do you mention it?”
    Shelly had thought about it over the nine hours that had passed since the two men ambushed her in her apartment. She’d run to Alex to ensure his safety—only to be broad-sided by his revelation—then to work, to do a final run-through for the depositions that would begin today in the deaf-ed case—and then to the federal courthouse, where she had found Jerod Romero.
    With the constant shift in focus, she felt punch-drunk, delirious, driven only by adrenaline. She could only imagine the impression she was making on the prosecutor.
    She had decided she would not reveal what had happened. Not yet. She couldn’t prove anything and she could only make matters worse. There was always time to do it. Ways to do it.
    “Something happened,” said