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A MURMUR RUNS THROUGH the jury box, and through the spectators behind me, like a low rumble of thunder.

It’s several seconds before I’m speaking again, but I know it seems like much longer in Judge Horton’s courtroom, and probably feels like an eternity, or two, to Brooke Milligan, who in this moment looks heartbroken.

I’m thinking, You’re not the only one, kid.

“You had him first, didn’t you?” I ask Brooke Milligan, thinking all over again how happy I am that Jimmy Cunniff had actually done his deep dive, even before we got our shitheel client to admit that Morgan Carson wasn’t his first conquest at Garden City High, back when he’d briefly opened a Nassau County office for his real estate business.

Brooke Milligan is staring now at him, with a look I couldn’t possibly begin to properly describe or comprehend, not sure whether it is sadness or anger or even shame.

“Did Morgan know?”

“Yes,” she says. “But she didn’t care. She was crazy for him. Like, literally.”

“But the fact is, he basically dumped you for your best friend, Morgan, didn’t he?”

She’s shouting now, maybe because now everyone knows her secrets.

“Yes!”

I keep my foot on the gas.

“And isn’t the real reason you came here today, Brooke, because at long last, you saw a chance to get even with him for doing that to you?” I say. “Humiliating you that way?”

“Objection!” Katherine Welsh says.

Now she’s the one who has raised her own voice.

“I’m not only objecting to that question, I’m objecting to this entire line of questioning, which has only served to put a cooperating witness into the line of fire,” Welsh says. “And embarrass her.”

“Sustained,” Judge Horton says, before telling the jury to ignore my last comment, and that it is being stricken from the record.

“I respectfully withdraw that last question, Your Honor,” I tell him.

“Too late,” Horton says, disgustedly. “You are completely out of order, Ms. Smith.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

But I’m not looking at the judge.

I’m looking directly at Brooke Milligan.