Fontaine sat down.
Caleb Miller testified on the fifth day.
He wore a cheap gray suit that didn’t fit in the shoulders. His mother, Sylvia, sat in the second row of the gallery with Aunt Lorraine beside her, both in their Sunday church hats. Aunt Lorraine had insisted on coming, walker and all.
Miller read his notebook entries out loud to the jury, one by one. When he got to Hattie Greene, his voice broke, and he needed to stop and drink water. The judge called a ten-minute recess.
When he came back, he finished.
“She asked for her pills four times,” he told the jury. “I counted. I wrote it down because I knew someday somebody would need to know the number. I asked the sheriff twice. He said, ‘She’ll live.’” Miller studied the table. “She didn’t live.”
In the gallery, a young man in his late teens with a fade haircut and a tight jaw put his face in his hands. That was Jaylen Greene, Hattie’s great-grandson, the boy who’d written one of the thirty-one letters on yellow legal paper. He was eighteen now and a freshman at Fort Valley State University.
