Chapter 2: Returning To The Empty Apartment
The walk from the county bus stop to the apartment complex took twenty minutes through the cooling gray afternoon. My legs felt heavy in my dark jeans, and the blue t-shirt clung to my back with the sweat of lingering adrenaline. Every step felt measured, bound by the memory of the thick glass partition in the jail visitation room and the echo of my mother’s tear-stained face pressed against it. When I reached our building, the metal screen door of unit 4B gave its familiar, rusty squeak as I pulled it open.
I unlocked the front door and pushed it inward, stepping out of the fading daylight into absolute stillness. The living room didn't just feel empty; it felt hollowed out. Last month, before the verdict and the frantic scramble of court dates, we had a brown tweed sofa, a low wooden coffee table where Mom graded her papers, and a small television set in the corner. Now there was only bare beige carpet showing the clean rectangular impressions where furniture used to sit. The legal fees had swallowed everything. Every piece of value had gone to pay a retainer for an attorney who had stopped returning our calls three weeks before the trial even began.
A single square of yellow mail lay on the floor just inside the threshold, pushed through the mail slot by the afternoon carrier. I bent down and picked it up, my sneakers scuffing the quiet floor. Beneath the utility notice warning of a pending shutoff for water and power lay a discarded brown manila envelope, partially torn. It wasn't mine. It belonged to the paperwork the lawyer had dumped on our kitchen counter before packing his leather briefcase for the last time and walking out of our lives.
I carried the papers over to the bare white windowsill where the last rays of sunlight stretched across the room. Pulling the contents from the envelope, I thumbed through a stack of court filings, most of them standard motions and hearing schedules. Near the bottom was a trial subpoena with a set of red ink notations scrawled across the margin in hurried, jagged handwriting. It was an initial witness list, marked up with notes about who would testify and who had been quietly dropped from the state's case.
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My thumb stopped on a name circled twice in heavy ink near the middle of the page: Assistant District Attorney Marcus Vance. Below his name, someone had written a short note regarding the suppression of a secondary witness statement—a detail that hadn't made it into the official transcripts handed to the jury. The realization hit me with the cold weight of lead. The lawyer we had trusted with our last savings hadn't just abandoned us out of incompetence; he had traded away our defense to streamline a conviction that the prosecutor's office wanted wrapped up before the end of the fiscal quarter.
I stood there in the echoing, unfurnished room, holding the subpoena tightly in my hand until the paper crinkled beneath my grip. The apartment was dead silent except for the low, distant hum of the refrigerator in the small kitchen—a machine that would likely stop running by tomorrow night if the utility notice was right. But the coldness in my chest had nothing to do with the failing appliances or the bare walls. I looked down at the name Marcus Vance written in red ink, folding the paper twice and slipping it deep into the front pocket of my jeans. The lawyer was gone, the furniture was gone, and the savings were gone, but the name remained. I had the subpoena, and tomorrow morning, I would find out exactly where to take it.
