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I’M BACK IN THE conference room with Rob Jacobson and Norma Banks and McGoey after Judge Horton has announced that he’s decided to adjourn for today, and that Katherine Welsh can begin calling witnesses first thing tomorrow morning.

I want to run across the room and give him a big kiss.

“I don’t appreciate being called a pig by my own lawyer,” Rob Jacobson says to me now.

“Get over it,” I tell him.

“Don’t do it again,” he says.

“Rob,” I say wearily, just wanting to be out of this room and on my way to the car, “please stop talking now.”

“And let’s face it, kid,” Norma Banks says, “if it oinks like a pig.”

“I have to take shit from her, grandma,” he says, wheeling on her. “Not from you.”

She gives him her Mrs. Claus smile and says cheerily, “Wanna bet?”

“You might not be in any mood to hear this right now, Rob,” McGoey says. “But Jane was great out there.”

“I thought her job was to draw blood from that bitch DA,” Jacobson says, “not me.”

Norma says, “You didn’t see it, because you wouldn’t. But it was a way for Jane to get the jury on her side.”

I say to Jacobson, “What she said.”

Then I stand.

“We’re not done here,” Jacobson says.

“Yeah,” I say, “we are.”

He’s hired a car and driver to bring him to court and then back to Amagansett. Norma Banks has, in fact, rented an Airbnb for the length of the trial, so as to avoid hours of daily train travel between here and the city.

McGoey has offered to drop her at the house in his Maserati. When she asked if she could drive, he said no.

“Because I’m old?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

I answer a handful of questions from the media waiting outside. Basic stuff, as if both the questions and answers were rehearsed. The last one is about how I thought I did today.

“You were in there, right?” I say to the reporter.

“I was,” he says.

I grin.

“Dude,” I say. “You still have to ask?”

When I get to my car, I see Rob Jacobson’s son, Eric, leaning casually against the front left fender.

If he was in court, I didn’t notice him, and his father didn’t mention that he was there. Maybe he slipped into the back.

There’s a smirk on his face that he’s either learned from his father or is just part of their messed-up genetic code.

“Pretty sure I recall telling you the last time I was in your presence that if you ever came near me again, I’d shoot you,” I say.

I reach into my bag.

“Is that any way to greet family?” he says.

I sigh.

“You’ve probably heard this plenty of times,” I tell him. “But please step away from the vehicle.”

He doesn’t move. But does flinch slightly when my hand comes out of the bag, before he sees I’m just pointing my key fob at him.

“Ask you something?” he says.

“When you get off my car.”

He doesn’t.

“How can you live with yourself?” he says. “Really. I’m curious about that. You know he did it. You know he did them all. Do you just not give a shit because you’re dying?”

He cocks his head to the side, as if suddenly curious about something else.

“You think you’ll even be alive to see the end of this trial?” he adds.

I remember his father basically saying the same thing to me when we were talking about Sonny Blum, the day he talked about Thomas McGoey being a backup plan.

But there’s nothing for me in talking about that with Jacobson’s deadbeat son. So I open the driver’s side door and get behind the wheel and then I suddenly have the car in motion and the door, still open, knocks him down as I drive past.

I look in the rearview mirror and see myself smiling.

Jane Effing Smith.

Maybe I won’t make it to the end of the trial.

But I ain’t dead yet.