“And yet you kept your cell phone passcode protected. It’s your testimony that your wife, who dealt with a significant amount of confidential information in her job, did not have a passcode on her phone, and thereby allowed whatever was on it to be accessed by anyone who happened to get hold of it?”

“Dana only used her BlackBerry for work. She often gave her iPhone to our son to play with. He’s only five. That’s why she didn’t put a passcode on it. There was nothing confidential on her iPhone.”

This is a small opening. But that’s where a good prosecutor makes her living, off the crumbs that defense witnesses leave behind.

“Nothing?” I say with as much sarcasm as possible. “Not nothing, Mr. Goodwin. On her iPhone is a running record of her long sexual affair with her boss. Isn’t that something?”

He still looks unperturbed, which means that I need to provoke him further.

I begin to read the texts aloud. “My love, my life, last night was incredible. I have never come so many times . . .”

“Objection,” Burrows says.

“Sustained,” Judge Gold says. “The texts are admitted into evidence, Ms. Broden. No reason to read them aloud.”

I tilt my head in a slightly rebellious acknowledgment of Judge Gold’s ruling. He’s not wrong, but I want the jury to know there was a lot more X-rated material where that came from.

“Mr. Goodwin, don’t you think that your wife viewed these texts—where she goes on about the sexual prowess of Lauren Wright being so far superior to your own—as confidential? Don’t you think they were something she wanted to keep you from reading?”

“Yes.”

“And yet you are telling us that she didn’t passcode-protect her phone?”

“Yes.”

That’s when it hits me. Like a thunderbolt, although it was there all along. Maybe Stuart Goodwin is not lying. Maybe his wife’s iPhone never did have a passcode.

And maybe he did read her texts.

54. DANA GOODWIN

54.

DANA GOODWIN

Judge Gold breaks for the day at 4:45 sharp. It’s a union thing. Overtime must be paid to the court officers and stenographer if they work past five, and Judge Gold, for all his power in the courtroom, probably doesn’t have authority to authorize the additional expense without the chief judge’s sign-off.

No one looks disappointed by the early start to the weekend, of course. At the end of all the previous court days, LeMarcus and I left together as if we were a couple, although it was always to head back to his office to prepare for the next day. Stuart went home alone to tend to Jacob. Tonight, however, in view of the weekend, LeMarcus tells me that we should reconvene tomorrow morning at his office, so Stuart and I depart together.