Free The Guilty by Gabriel Boutros

un-shaded bedroom window. He had been awake for nearly two hours, but hadn’t yet left his room. He looked out the window while still seated on the edge of his bed, a sense of deja vu coming over him. Lately he seemed to be spending a lot of time staring out of windows, mentally replaying scenes of the confrontations he kept having with Jeannie.
    Down on the snow-covered trails of Mount Royal a lone jogger was braving the biting cold. The jogger’s breath appeared in regular puffs of condensation through the opening of a ski mask. It must be 20 below, Bratt thought. Health nut!
    He let out a soft sigh and his eyes turned to the framed picture on his night table: Jeannie at age three, sitting on her mother’s lap. Fifteen years later she was still as precious to him as ever, despite the feelings of anger and frustration she inspired in him, seemingly at will.
    He hadn’t gone out of his room yet because he didn’t want to pass her open bedroom door again. He couldn’t bear to see how empty her room had become. She had taken everything with her: old stuffed toys from her childhood, posters of rock stars and teen actors, her clothes, her books. Just her and this “friend” of hers, André.
    Who the hell is André, and how come I never heard of him before ?
    His eyes moved to his wife’s face in the picture, but he looked away quickly, feeling ashamed. He peered back out at the mountain, then let his gaze move up, past the forest trails, to the cemetery where Deirdre was buried. What would she think of him now? Wasn’t doing much of a job looking after their daughter, was he?
    He had raised Jeannie alone for the past eight years, and had been better at it than many people had expected. Now, over something that was beyond his control, but which was bothering him more than he cared to admit, she had turned away from him.   
    Last night, for the first time since she was born, he had no idea where his daughter had slept. He had thought to call some of her friends, but then decided not to. He couldn’t face the possibility that they might lie to him, at her request, about her whereabouts. The most likely place for her to go, the place where she spent nearly as much time as her own home, was at Claire’s and he wasn’t about to call there. What in the world could he say to Claire now?
    Testifying in that trial had nearly destroyed her. But what was he supposed to do, start hating himself and his job because someone he was close to had gotten hurt? What good would that do now? He had refused to take on Nate Morris’s defense specifically because the case had involved Claire, and God knew Morris had paid him well in the past. So, why should he feel guilty about the job the other lawyer had done on her?
    T eenagers could allow themselves to be impetuous and to change the paths they had chosen at the drop of a hat. That kind of knee-jerk reaction to everything going on in the world was a luxury that he could not afford.
    He fell back in his bed, bare feet still on the floor, and stared up at the ceiling. He tried to clear his mind, concentrating on a small crack in the off-white paint above him, but to no avail.
    “Dammit, I gotta be in court in an hour,” he said aloud, but there was nobody in the apartment to answer him. There were only his thoughts, and these had become quite repetitive since 6 a.m.
    Strange thing about self-pity , he thought. It never seemed to get boring.

The rest of the day seemed to go by in slow motion. As Bratt fretted about his daughter’s whereabouts, Judge Smythe wrapped up his instructions to the jurors, who then went off to deliberate on the fate of Cooper Hall. Bratt left Hall sitting on a bench outside the courtroom, and wandered the courthouse corridors alone while waiting for the verdict to come in.
    He never could stand being in his client’s presence for too long, and often had the urge to check if his wallet was still there when he and Hall would part company, such was the effect