Page 102 of The Hamptons Lawyer

“Objection!”

Horton puts up a hand. “I’ll allow it,” he says. “Speaks to both the victim’s state of mind, and the witness’s at the same time.”

Brooke Milligan is looking past me, to Katherine Welsh. But Welsh can’t help her right now because no one can.

Brooke turns to the judge. “Do I have to answer that?”

But Horton is looking at me. Occasionally there comes a moment when the person behind the bench has to trust the person in the arena, almost on faith.

I nod at him.

“Please answer the question,” Horton says to her.

She tries to buy herself some time. “Could you repeat the question, please?” she says to me.

“Certainly,” I say. “I just asked if you yourself had ever been involved with an older man, say the summer before school started that year.”

“Yes,” she says, her voice barely audible.

“While you were obviously the same age as Morgan?”

“Yes.”

This is hardly more than a whisper.

“I’m not sure everybody could hear you, Brooke.”

“Yes,” she says.

“And could you tell us if that man is in this courtroom?”

She looks down at the hands in her lap, then back up at me.

“Yes,” she says.

“Could you point him out for the jury, please.”

She waits as long as she possibly can, as if there is some way for her to run out the clock on this line of questioning, before she points directly at Rob Jacobson.

EIGHTY

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 knowshersecrets.