If Quentin is ever going to object, now is the time. But he doesn’t. Even as Joe Elder looks expectantly at him, Quentin simply watches Shad carry the old Polaroid snapshot over to the jury and give it to the woman seated at bottom left in the box. Her eyes narrow, then widen, and then her whole face goes red. I can’t bear to turn and look at my mother’s face. Ahead of me, my father simply stares straight ahead, at the judge’s bench. My mother might as well be a mannequin posed beside me, for all the life she shows.

“What did you do with what you’d found in the box?” Shad asks.

“I confronted my mother with it.”

“How did she react?”

“She finally told me the truth. The real truth.”

“Which was?”

“She said my father was Dr. Tom Cage, from Natchez, Mississippi. She’d known it from the beginning. She’d been protecting him all those years. That was why she’d lied to me, and to Jelks.”

“Did she say anything else about Dr. Cage during that conversation?”

“She told me that a lot of the money that put me through school had come from him.”

“This is very important, Lincoln. Did she say whether or not Dr. Cage knew he was your father?”

Lincoln’s brown face darkens with blood. “Of course he knew!”

“Did your mother tell you that?”

“Yes. That’s why he sent the money all those years. Mama said Dr. Cage had kept us going during the times that Daddy was spending every dime she made. And she begged me not to do anything to disrupt his family life.”

“He’s lying,” Mom whispers in my ear.

“About what?”

“Tom never knew he had a son by that woman.”

Shad says, “How did that make you feel?”

“Sick,” Lincoln replies. “That man had ruined our lives, and Mama still worshipped him. She said most other men would have left her high and dry with her baby, but Dr. Cage had always provided for us. I couldn’t make her see different.”

“Can you prove Dad didn’t know about the child?” I whisper to Mom.

“How can I prove a negative?”

“You can’t. And the jury will see him sending that money for so long as proof.”

Mom’s voice grows louder in my ear. “Tom could have been sending that simply out of guilt over the affair! Or because she was raped and had to leave town. It doesn’t mean he knew.”

She sounds so certain that a question occurs to me. “Mom . . . did you know Dad was sending that money?”

My mother gives me a glare that could freeze vodka, and I face forward again.

Shad has moved closer to Lincoln, and now he really does his best to imitate Dr. Phil. “How did that make you feel, Lincoln?”