It was permitted. Strange, but permitted.

The hearing was set for Wednesday, September the twenty-fourth, at nine a.m. in Courtroom Two.

Elijah went home that evening, lay down on his bed with his father's tie draped across his chest, and stared at the ceiling until the cracks blurred into stars. His mother knocked softly and came in with a plate of cold cornbread.

"You nervous?" she asked.

"No, ma'am."

"Liar."

He smiled at the ceiling. "A little."

She sat on the edge of the bed and smoothed his hair, as she had when he was small. "Good," she said. "Your daddy was always nervous before a big speech. He used to say a man who isn't nervous isn't paying attention."

"What did he do about it?"

"He got up anyway."

Elijah closed his eyes. Outside the window, crickets sang in the dark, and somewhere far off, a train moaned along the tracks, carrying its freight to somewhere far away.

In the morning, he would put on the suit.

Chapter 6: The Double Doors

The Miller County Courthouse smelled like floor wax, old coffee, and fear.

Elijah noticed it the moment he stepped inside. The lobby was a long, cool corridor of speckled linoleum, lit by fluorescent tubes that hummed like trapped insects. A metal detector stood near the entrance, manned by a deputy named Curtis who had been eating a sausage biscuit and now stopped mid-bite.

"Can I help you, son?"

"Yes, sir. Courtroom Two. State versus Carrington, nine o'clock."

The deputy looked at the suit, then the briefcase, then the face above them. "You with the family?"

"I'm the representative."

Curtis opened his mouth, closed it, and waved him through. The briefcase went down the conveyor belt, and the machine beeped at the broken latch. The deputy popped it open, found nothing but folders and a law book, and handed it back with the expression of a man who had decided not to ask.

Elijah walked on.

* * *

He had one stop to make before the courtroom.

Near the water fountain at the end of the hall, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and his eyes fixed on his phone, stood Dwayne Carter. He wore a charcoal suit that fit him perfectly. His hair was slicked back. When he saw Elijah, his thumb froze on the screen.

"You actually came," Carter said.

"I told you I would."

"I assumed you'd come to your senses." He pushed off the wall and stepped closer, lowering his voice. "Listen to me, kid. This isn't a school project. A judge like Tolbert will chew you up. He'll embarrass you in front of the whole town, and then he'll bury your brother just to prove a point."

"Belief doesn't win trials, son."

"No, sir. But the truth might."

Carter shook his head slowly. He muttered something about too many movies, adjusted his cuffs, and strode off toward the parking lot. Elijah watched him go. He felt no anger. He felt only a kind of sad clarity, like finding out the bridge you had been told was solid had been painted on the water.

* * *

The double doors of Courtroom Two were made of heavy, dark oak, with brass handles worn dull by a century of palms. Elijah paused before them and closed his eyes.

One breath. Two. Three.

He heard his father's voice, low and steady, the way it had sounded on the porch that last summer. You don't walk into a room to be liked, Eli. You walk in to be heard. Those are different things.

He pushed.

The doors swung inward with a long, ceremonial groan, and the sound of the room rolled over him like a wave.

It was larger than he had imagined, and plainer. Wooden pews, six rows deep, packed with faces. A low rail separating the gallery from the well of the court. Two tables facing a raised bench, a witness stand, a jury box standing empty. A flag in each corner. And above it all, on the wall behind the bench, the seal of the State of Georgia, gold and stern, watching the room like an old, unblinking eye.

Every head in the gallery turned.

For a moment, there was no sound. Then it began, the whispers, sweeping from the front rows to the back like wind through dry grass.

Who is that boy?

Somebody's grandson?

Is that a suit or a tent?

He walked down the center aisle with his chin level and his gaze fixed forward. He could feel the stares crawling along his shoulders. A woman near the aisle covered her mouth to hide a grin. A heavyset man in a seed-company cap whispered something to his neighbor, and both of them shook with quiet laughter.

In the third row, an elderly man with a notepad on his knee leaned forward and squinted. This was Mr. Klein, retired postal supervisor, self-appointed archivist of every trial held in Miller County since 1994. He had seen murderers and embezzlers and a man who once tried to pay his fine in live chickens. He had never seen this.

* * *

Isaiah was already seated at the defense table.

They had brought him in through the side door, in his orange jumpsuit, wrists cuffed in front of him, ankles shackled to a bar beneath the table. He looked smaller than he had behind the glass. But when he saw Elijah coming down the aisle in that enormous, borrowed suit, his face did something Elijah had not seen it do in thirty-three days.

He smiled.

It was not a big smile. It was crooked and wet-eyed and trembling at the edges. But it was real, and it was the most beautiful thing Elijah had ever seen.

"Nice suit," Isaiah whispered as Elijah slid into the chair beside him.

"It's Dad's."