At half past two, Theo read another page. At three, Andre stood and paced again. At half past three, the corridor went still in the particular way corridors go still when something is about to happen, and Jesse looked up.
Down the quiet corridor, past the water fountain, past the flag in its stand, the jury-room door opened.
Chapter 26: Not Guilty
The knock came at three forty-one, and Jesse felt it in his teeth before he understood what it was.
He was sitting in the witness room with Andre, Theo, and his mother, and the four of them had been doing nothing for an hour and forty minutes — the kind of nothing that is actually everything. Theo had his notebook open on his knee but he had not written a line. Lena had folded and refolded the same napkin. Andre had his hands clasped so tight the knuckles were white, and Jesse had been reading the same page of a pocket evidence manual for twenty minutes without turning it.
Then the knock, and the door opened, and the bailiff said the words every lawyer in history waits to hear: "The jury has a verdict."
Jesse stood. His legs did not shake. That surprised him a little, the steadiness, and then it didn't surprise him at all, because there was nothing left in him to shake with. He had given everything to the closing argument and whatever was left was just wiring.
The courtroom filled fast. Jesse could hear it before he saw it — the rustle and murmur of a crowd that had been waiting in the hall since noon, reporters and neighbors and half of Laurel Fork squeezed onto the benches. The judge's clerk called the room to order. Judge Pruitt took the bench and his face gave nothing away, which was its own kind of mercy. The jury filed in. Jesse watched their faces the way he had been trained to watch everything — not for hope, but for information. He looked for the woman in the second row, the one who had cried during the closing. She was not crying now. She was looking at Andre, and her face was open.
"Has the jury reached a verdict?" Pruitt said.
"We have, Your Honor," the foreman said, and stood, and handed the folded slip to the bailiff, who handed it to the judge, who read it without moving a muscle and handed it back.
"The defendant will rise."
Andre stood. Jesse stood beside him, because that was where he belonged, because there was nowhere else in the world to be. Ray Delgado stood too, half a step behind, and Jesse was grateful for him in a way he would never find the right words to say.
"On the count of armed robbery," the foreman read, "we find the defendant — not guilty."
The room made a sound like a held breath finally released, but the foreman was still reading.
"On the count of possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony, we find the defendant — not guilty."
And then the courtroom erupted.
It was not orderly. It was not dignified. It was a sound that had been building for four days and it came out of the gallery all at once — a shout, a sob, applause that did not care about the rules. Someone yelled Andre's name. Theo was on his feet. Lena cried out, a sound that was not a word, that was every prayer she had ever prayed in a hospital cafeteria arriving at the same moment.
Pruitt brought the gavel down, hard, twice, three times. "Order! This court will have order!" And Jesse saw it — saw the judge's hand come down and saw the tears in the old man's eyes at the same time, and understood that the order was not anger. It was a man holding the frame together so the picture inside could be beautiful.
The room quieted. The foreman's voice finished its work. The charges fell away one by one, not guilty, not guilty, until there was nothing left of the state's case but paper.
Jesse did not move. He had imagined this moment a hundred times in the library, in the dark, in the long months of preparation, and in every version he had been ready. In the real version he was not ready. He was perfectly still. His hands were at his sides. His heart was doing something loud in his chest that he could hear through the silence.
Then Andre turned to him, and Andre was weeping — Andre, who never wept, who had held it together through every day of the trial — and Jesse's arms were around his brother before he made the decision to move, and the charcoal suit was crushed between them, and Andre's voice was broken against his shoulder saying, "You did it, Jess. You did it."