“Are you?” Hester asked, interrupting his thoughts. “Do you have any grounds? Did Winchester make some mistake?”

“No,” he said simply.

She swallowed and cleared her throat. “Did you?”

“Not so far as I know. Tactical, perhaps. Maybe if I had tried harder, I could have persuaded him not to take the stand himself, but he was adamant. I don’t think you can refuse to let a man speak in his own defense, if you have warned him of the danger and he still insists. But perhaps I should have thought of something.”

“You can’t go on retrying a case every different way until you get the verdict you want,” she pointed out.

He looked down at the desktop. He knew he shouldn’t say what he was going to, and yet the words spilled out.

“Margaret says I should have built in some error, so that I could have appealed afterward. She believes I have put my own career before her father’s life, because I am ambitious and essentially selfish.” He met her eyes. “Is that true? If I really loved her, more than I loved myself, would I have?”

“Have you ever made a deliberate mistake?” she asked, as if turning the thought over in her mind.

“No.” He smiled bitterly. “Not deliberate. Many accidental. Would an appeal court know the difference?”

“Possibly,” she granted. “But unless you were totally incompetent, it wouldn’t make them grant a new trial, would it? Anyway, what good would a new trial do? They’d only come to the same decision, except that someone else would be representing Ballinger, probably less well, and certainly with less dedication. It isn’t reasonable, Oliver. Don’t try arguing with her. You won’t win, because she isn’t listening. She is terrified. Everything she is and believes is slipping out of her grasp.”

“I’m still here,” he said simply. “She just doesn’t want me. I’ve done everything I can to save Ballinger. I failed. But I think I failed because he’s guilty.”

“She’ll realize that in time.”

He knew in that moment, with an overwhelming grief, that he was not sure he would ever see Margaret with the same tenderness and trust, even if eventually she did accept the truth.

“She has made it a condition,” he said aloud.

“A condition? For what?” Hester looked puzzled.

“If I do not manage to appeal for her father, Margaret will leave me, go back to comfort and care for her mother.” Now that he’d said it, it was real, not just a nightmare hovering around him like a covering darkness. And yet the house was unbearable. They walked around each other, icily polite. He came to bed late. She was either asleep or pretending to be. He did not speak. It was over a week since they had touched each other, even in the smallest gesture. It was infinitely worse than being alone.