Page 44 of The Better Sister

“Are you sure? The field office is in Manhattan.”

“Sorry, not the actual field office, but like a branch. I think it’s called a resident agency.”

He shrugged. “Shows what I know about criminal law.”

“Is it possible that’s the office that was investigating Gentry?”

“I don’t think so. Our contacts have been with the Southern District.”

I knew from Adam’s prior employment there that the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District covered Manhattan and the areas north, while Queens and Brooklyn fell into the Eastern District.

“Can you find out?”

“What’s this all about?”

“Maybe Adam was providing information to the FBI about Gentry.”

“That would be a blatant ethical violation. He would have been disbarred.”

Would Adam have cared? I was probably the only person who knew just how much Adam had been struggling since he’d taken that job at Rives & Braddock. He didn’t feel like the good guy anymore. It’s like he’d become another person.

“But let’s say he was willing to break all the rules. Was Gentry doing something that, in Adam’s mind, would have warranted it? Just how much of a threat was Adam to that company?”

“I’m really sorry, Chloe, but I can’t have this conversation with you. I don’t break the rules, not even for you.”

“So what should I do with this information?” I gestured toward my laptop. “This could be what got Adam killed. It proves that Ethan’s innocent.”

He pulled me close and kissed the top of my head. “I can’t be the one you talk to about this.”

I woke up in my own bed the following morning to the remote sound of Nicky yelling my name.

I pulled on my pajama pants and found her heading in my direction in the hallway. Behind her, I could see mountains of bagged candy on the kitchen island. “Happy Halloween,” I groused, not remembering a time when Nicky had beaten me out of bed.

“I don’t think so. There’s a guy on the front porch who said he’ll wait for you all day if he has to.”

The guy was a process server, and he had a subpoena for me. I was on the prosecution’s witness list for Ethan’s trial.

26

The jury selection alone consumed four days. Some of the potential jurors had the usual excuses: babies to watch, jobs to work, too much to do to sit in a courtroom for what might be weeks. A few were probably looking to get thrown out, like the guy who said defendants should have to prove they’re innocent. But the biggest problem was finding people who didn’t already have an opinion about the case. Almost all of them had heard some of the pretrial news coverage, and most of them walked into the courthouse with at least a glimmer of a viewpoint. And from what I could tell, those preexisting views did not cut in Ethan’s favor. As one woman said, “I mean, his mom’s, like, famous. I don’t think they’d arrest him and put him on trial unless he really did it.”

Olivia had tried to convince us that the negative first impressions were ultimately to Ethan’s advantage to get all those people tossed from the jury. The ones who were left were what she called either “low-information jurors” or “very open-minded.” It sounded to me like she thought only dumb people would vote to acquit, which was hardly encouraging.

For the first day of the actual trial, after jurors had been selected and sworn, I wore slim black pants, an off-white silk blouse, and a dark green blazer. To my surprise, the internet had a lot to say about it that afternoon. Supporters wore dark green and posted photographs with the hashtags #StepmotherPower and #FreeEthan. Opponents... well, they were opposed.

The judge’s name was Lydia Rivera. On first instinct, I was relieved it was a woman, thinking she’d be more sympathetic to a teenage defendant, but it turned out she was a former prosecutor. Olivia told us not to read into it one way or the other. “She’s middle-of-the-road. We could do better, but we could also do a lot worse.”

The prosecutor was a man named Mike Nunzio. According to Olivia, he was less experienced than some of the ADAs who handled homicide cases in Suffolk County, but he was seen as an up-and-comer in the office, getting promoted through the ranks at record speed.

Nunzio delivered his opening statement with elegance and confidence. His demeanor reminded me of Adam’s, the few times I’d seen him do his thing in court. As a matter of professional ethics, prosecutors were forbidden from stating their personal belief in a defendant’s guilt. But Adam used to say that it shouldn’t be necessary to use the words “I believe the defendant did it.” He believed jurors could tell when a lawyer spoke with moral certainty. When Mike Nunzio spelled out the evidence he expected to introduce against Ethan, he sounded like a man who was absolutely convinced Ethan was a coldhearted killer.

Olivia had told us to expect an objection to the fact that Nicky and I were sitting in the courtroom. I was expressly on the witness list, and Nicky could still potentially be called as well. Even though Nunzio could obviously see us as he paced the courtroom, he said nothing to object.

After the first fifteen minutes, I had stopped worrying about him kicking us out of the room and was focused on the content of his statement. When he spoke about “the defendant,” it didn’t sound anything like Ethan. It was as if he were speaking about a fictional character on a television show. He described Ethan’s transformation from a little boy without a mother to a privileged young man attending private school, shuttling between a multimillion-dollar apartment in downtown Manhattan and a luxury beach house in East Hampton. He spoke of him as a coddled teenager who refused to accept even the slightest bit of discipline.

“You’ve heard of affluenza? You’re going to learn that Ethan Macintosh suffered from that affliction, and that his father, Adam Macintosh, was killed because he was determined to set his son on another path.”

Olivia’s objection was sustained, but I could tell that the depiction of my son as a pampered, entitled brat had taken hold. By my count, at least four of the jurors were visibly skeptical as Olivia portrayed Ethan as a naive, traumatized kid who got ensnared in a shoddy police investigation that had jumped to conclusions too quickly.

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