Jenny looks more worried than before. “But hasn’t Quentin done a wonderful job in the end? He destroyed two of Shad’s main witnesses.”

“Absolutely. He proved that they both perjured themselves.”

“Well, then,” Mom says. “That’s reasonable doubt right there.”

“I think you’re right.”

“Well, what’s about to happen?” Jenny asks. “I tried to pay attention during the judge’s instructions, but I kept drifting off. Give me the last act for dummies.”

“Closing arguments,” I tell her. “Shad Johnson and Quentin each get one hour to summarize their cases for the jury. Typically, the prosecutor will take thirty minutes of his hour, then sit down. The defense is required to give all his remarks in one go, the full hour, if he wants to speak that long. Then the prosecutor has thirty minutes left to finish.”

“So Shad gets to hear Quentin’s whole pitch before he finishes.”

“Right. And that’s a real advantage. It helped me win a lot of cases back in Houston.”

Mom kicks me under the table, and I feel my face go red.

“I think we’re about to see Quentin Avery’s finest hour,” she announces.

She stands up and flattens her skirt. “I’m going to run upstairs to the ladies’ room. I’ll see you all in a minute. Jenny, we should get back to the courthouse as soon as possible.”

After Mom leaves the room, Jenny swallows her last bite of lasagna. “What’s wrong? Were you holding something back in front of Mom? Did we miss something important?”

“No, not really.”

“Then what is it?” she presses.

“Everybody seems to be forgetting the fact that when Viola made that tape for Henry, she was doing it in the expectation that Dad was going to euthanize her. The things she said in the recording did a lot to puncture Shad’s theories about Dad’s motive to silence her, but even if he injected her out of a desire to give her a dignified death, that’s murder. Not assisted suicide. I expect Shad to make that clear in his closing. Trying this case on motive may have bitten Shad in the ass, but that doesn’t change the facts. Motive doesn’t really have anything to do with whether Dad committed murder or not. It comes down to what the jury believes happened in that room. What physically happened. If they think he injected her with that adrenaline as well as the morphine, they could convict him.”

“But if they think Daddy injected her out of a sense of mercy, don’t you think they’ll acquit him in the end?”