Chapter 25 · The Unbroken Line

Chapter 25: The Unbroken Line

"Order!" The judge's gavel hangs in the air, frozen an inch above the sound block. My finger is already on the switcher.

Three seconds. That's what I've got before he brings it down and calls this hearing closed, before my father's lawyers haul me out in cuffs for a crime my own mother's voice can erase in under a minute.

I press it.

The hall speakers scream static for half a second, then my mother's voice drops into the room like a stone through glass.

"—my husband moves the Baltimore numbers through the depot ledgers, not me. Ask him about the green stamp on pier nine. Ask him why June's name is on an account she's never seen—"

Every head in the gallery turns at once. Reporters who were halfway out of their seats freeze mid-stand. My father, at the podium twenty feet from the dock, goes the color of wet chalk.

"Turn that off," he says, too loud, too fast. "That's doctored. That's the same kind of splice they tried to pin on my daughter—"

"It's not spliced.