They took seats around a custom concrete conference table. Hawley pulled out a moleskin journal and a pen while his colleagues set up laptops. “Start at the beginning,” he urged Nat, his smile avuncular. “You can be honest in this room.”

Nat was glad of her lawyer’s accessible nature. Ignoring his intimidating sidekicks, she told Hawley about her relationship with Gabe, how she’d met him through the sugar website, how their relationship had morphed into something meaningful. “We loved each other,” she assured her attorney, and vicariously, his two associates and her mother. “It was real, before it all went wrong.”

She recounted Gabe’s abrupt breakup, her shock, pain, and confusion. Nat explained how she’d followed Violet Turnmill to the Met, how the girl had quickly developed a crush on her, how Nat had accepted the invitation to her graduation pool party. “I shouldn’t have gone,” she admitted, “but I just wanted to see Gabe. To talk to him.”

Hawley met her eyes. “Did Gabe’s wife and daughter have any idea about your relationship with their husband and father?”

“No,” Nat answered truthfully. “They were completely clueless.” She heard her mother exhale heavily. Her daughter’s moral lapses were a source of disappointment. Or was it disgust?

Finally, Nat told her defense counsel about her walk with Gabe on the High Line, about their horrible fight on Thirty-Fourth Street, how she’d clawed his wrist, his blood and skin getting under her nails. She relayed her visit to the saloon/sports bar, the creepy man with the green eyes who had scared her out of there, how she’d ended up at a club.

“Someone must have roofied me or something. I remember walking out onto the street and then . . . that’s it.” She omitted the flash of memory in the shower: Gabe’s frightened face, his desperate plea, the sound of the gunshot. “It’s all a blank until I woke up on the floor of my apartment.”

The typing stopped. The pen was set down on the table. Matthew Hawley leaned back in his chair.

“We’ve submitted our demand to produce to the prosecution. When they hand over discovery, we’ll review it, do some investigations of our own, and strategize a defense.”

Nat’s mom spoke in a tight voice. “How long will all this take?”

“The prosecutor has six months to indict.”

“Six months?” Allana could not mask her panic. Six months away from her job, her husband, her young children. Six months of sleeping on Nat’s hard sofa, of wandering around an inhospitable city, of supporting a daughter who had killed a man.

“We can negotiate pre-indictment,” Hawley assured her. “Often, an expeditious plea bargain is the best course of action.”

A plea bargain.

Nat didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but she was too afraid to ask.

52

Discovery

So Natalie and her mother waited. Days and then weeks passed. On occasion, a photographer would snap Nat’s photo as she and her mom went to buy coffees or groceries, but otherwise, they were left alone. Nat’s mom and Derek paid the rent on the studio for another month. Allana’s calls home became tense and fraught. “Yes, I know I have three children, Derek. But only one of them is fighting for her life right now.” Nat could feel the strain she was causing her mother’s marriage through the closed bathroom door.