The Daughter Who Cleared My Name

And it nearly cost me the truth, because six weeks before trial, my attorney sat across from me at his little folding table and told me, gently, the way you tell someone bad news you’ve delivered before, that the state’s evidence looked bad, that Garnett’s testimony and the bank records would likely be enough on their own, and that a plea to a lesser charge, probation and restitution instead of prison, might be the wisest thing on the table.

I remember asking him if he believed me.

He said it didn’t matter what he believed. It mattered what twelve strangers would believe by Friday.

I did not take the plea. I don’t know if it was faith, or stubbornness, or the fact that Hettie had started drawing me pictures of the two of us standing in front of the store with our name over the door, and I could not sign a piece of paper that told her the state believed her mother was a thief. I told my attorney I would take my chances with the truth, even if the truth had apparently stopped being persuasive to anyone who mattered.

The trial ran four days. Garnett testified on the second, in a gray suit I had picked out for him at a department store in Springfield six Christmases earlier, and he said the words that gutted me worse than anything the prosecutor said: that he had built that business with his own two hands, that he had trusted me completely, and that finding out his wife had been quietly draining it for the better part of a year felt like losing a limb. The jury believed him. I watched three of them nod.