The jurors settle into their seats, twelve people looking very tired, like in that movie she loves so much with Henry Fonda. Jason had to read the play in high school, and the two of them rented the movie and watched it twice afterward. From the pictures early in the trial, Shelley has not been able to forget the image of the girl there naked in her chair with the needle in her arm. Her thin, pale body made Shelley ache with cold, and she kept thinking how she wanted to take the afghan there behind the girl on the chair and wrap it around her. The friend, Joanna, had testified that was the young woman’s favorite place to sit, that it faced the sunset and that the chair had once belonged to her mother, the only belonging she had from her mother, and Shelley realized that day that she really has nothing that belonged to her mother; at the time, she wanted nothing to remind her and took only a couple of things that had once been her brother’s—the stuffed dog, the Saint Christopher medallion he wore one summer, not because he believed but because everyone was wearing them and a girl he liked had given it to him for Christmas. He said the girl had said it would protect him; he’d laughed and said, “Good luck with that,” and yet he wore it faithfully that whole summer.

Who could leave someone that way? Cold and naked in a chair? Did she ask him to stay? Or did she tell him to leave her alone. “Leave me alone.” That’s what Princess Diana said when people tried to get her from the back of that car in the tunnel. Shelley had read that in a magazine. She said, “Oh my God.” And she said, “Leave me alone.”

Harvey doesn’t mean to get in trouble, she will tell the teacher. He’s a sweet, good boy who is afraid. That’s all. Then she will tell how he built a Lego structure that was a camp for runaway turtles and salamanders and skinks who need someone to love them. She will say, He’s a good boy. He just really misses his brother.

“He took an innocent life,” the prosecutor had said, “just because she was in his way.”

The room is silent now, finally silent, and tense with the waiting.