The week before the hearing dragged like a fever that wouldn't break. Our house in Hampstead, which had felt so full of promise only days earlier, now felt like a waiting room in a hospital where no one would tell you the diagnosis. Every room had been repurposed for the case. Legal briefs covered the dining table in overlapping drifts, color-coded tabs bristling from their edges. Evidence binders stacked the kitchen counter where cookbooks used to sit. The living room — the one we had imagined filled with laughter at family dinners — had become a staging ground for Sarah's security team, their equipment cases lined against the wall like coffins.
They moved through the house with quiet, professional precision: checking locks twice, testing alarms at odd hours, sweeping the corners of room
