Chapter 10: Frances on the Stand
The suppression hearing was held twelve days later.
Frances Holt arrived at the courthouse in a navy blue coat, carrying the original folder of notes — not a copy, the original — in a leather document case she had owned for thirty years.
She sat in the hallway outside the hearing room with her hands folded in her lap and did not look nervous.
Marlowe sat beside her.
"You don't have to stay," Frances said.
"I know," Marlowe said.
They sat together without speaking for a while.
"I've been thinking," Frances said eventually, "about the first time I met you.
Do you remember?
Garrick brought you to the house for Sunday lunch.
You were twenty-nine.
You wore a green dress."
Marlowe looked at her.
"I remember."
"Cordelia introduced you to the other guests as Garrick's friend." Frances said the word carefully.
"Not his girlfriend.
His friend.
You'd been together two years by then."
"I remember that too."
"You smiled and said nothing." Frances looked at the hearing room door.
"I thought then — she's stronger than she looks.
I thought: that one's going to need to be."
Marlowe didn't say anything.
"I should have spoken sooner," Frances said.
"I want you to know I know that."
"You're speaking now," Marlowe said.
---
Whitmore's argument in the suppression hearing was precise and aggressive.
Frances had been employed in a private household.
The conversations she had documented were private.
Her notes were taken without consent.
Their use as evidence violated Cordelia Sterling's privacy rights.
Sable's counter was equally precise.
Frances had been present in her professional capacity.
There was no reasonable expectation of privacy from one's own household staff during a business discussion.
The notes were Frances's personal record of her own observations, not a recording or interception of any kind.
The judge — not Blackwood, a different judge for the suppression hearing — asked Frances three questions directly.
"Were you asked to leave the room during these conversations?"
"No, Your Honor."
"Were you asked to maintain confidentiality about what was discussed?"
"No, Your Honor."
"Were the notes written at the time of the conversations or reconstructed later from memory?"
"Written at the time, Your Honor.
I kept a daily log.
I have done so for most of my working life."
The judge looked at the notes.
He looked at Whitmore.
He looked at Sable.
"Motion denied," he said.
---
Whitmore caught up with Marlowe in the corridor outside.
Not to speak to her — he knew better than that.
But he walked past close enough that she could hear him say, quietly, to the colleague beside him: "She coached that woman.
Every answer was rehearsed."
Marlowe stopped walking.
Sable touched her arm.
"Don't."
"I'm not going to do anything," Marlowe said.
She turned and looked at Whitmore directly.
He met her eyes for a moment, then looked away.
She kept walking.
---
That evening, Garrick called again.
She didn't answer.
He left a voicemail — the first voicemail he had left since this began.
She listened to it once.
His voice was different again.
Not cold.
Not calculating.
Something that might have been, in another context, genuine.
*Marlowe.
I know you won't believe this.
But I never meant for it to go this far.
The transfer — I panicked.
I thought you were going to take everything.
I thought — I don't know what I thought.
I'm not asking you to forgive me.
I'm asking you to consider whether destroying my life is actually what you want.
Because I don't think it is.
I don't think that's who you are.*
She listened to it once.
Then she forwarded it to Sable with a single line: *He called.
Saving this.*
She did not listen to it again.
But she sat for a long time in her living room in the dark, not because she was moved by it — she wasn't, not exactly — but because she was thinking about the version of herself that might have been moved by it.
The version that had spent fourteen years believing that when Garrick said something quietly and with feeling, it meant something true.
That version of herself had been wrong a great many times.
She turned on the lamp.
Made tea.
Sat down with a book she didn't read.
May you like
The trial date was set for six weeks from now.
She had six weeks to be ready.
