Page 6 of Breakdown
Chapter Two
NIK LOOKED AMAZINGin the suit Peter picked for him as he entered the witness stand. At least he had done that right. Peter wanted to get something three times as expensive, but he had a hard-enough time even talking Nik into this one. He kept trying to insist that the baggy, three-button, off-the-rack number that had clearly been in his closet since 2008 was fine. The suit they finally settled on was simple, but elegant: a slim-fit virgin-wool-silk blend in a tastefully understated slate micro-pinstripe, tailored to hit Nik in all the right places. He looked handsome and well-put-together, and Peter didn’t have a doubt that the jury would notice that too.
It was after lunch before the judge called on him. The trial operated with its own hazy sense of time. It was like this morning had taken place a million years ago. The shame over Mia still weighed heavily on Peter’s shoulders, piled on top of the guilt that he wasn’t paying closer attention to the unfolding trial. Courtrooms made him jittery. He couldn’t shake the feeling that, at any moment, they might call him to account for his unpunished crimes and send him back to jail where he belonged.
Part of it was that Peter had heard this about ten times already, and although this sort of tragedy could never be boring, it was deeply familiar now. It probably always would be. Stuart Booth had come to their house for dinner last week. They’d fed the lawyer a medium-rare porterhouse steak and a nice kale salad, and then, for the last time, Stu and Nik drilled the testimony and the potential cross-examination questions until Nik was exhausted and flawless. Nik wanted to keep going, but Stuart called it a night around one in the morning and Peter had been grateful. And Stuart was right. Nik was doing great up there.
“My daughter, Mia, we sent her home with my sister-in-law. If it had been ten minutes later...” Nik’s voice broke a little.
Beside Peter, Nina went rigid, her spine stiffening. He rested his hand on top of her tightly folded ones. He overheard Nik and Nina talk about it once, standing in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher while Peter sat in the living room, pretending not to eavesdrop. He knew Nina put the blame on herself for going home early that night. And yeah, maybe if she was there, she could've stopped Stavros from doing what he’d come to do. But it was a lot more likely that she and Mia would've just ended up dead too.
“But they went home. Helena and her brother stayed at the shop and I went to pick up more candy; I was worried that we would run out.” Nik exhaled a pained laugh—a soft, wet chuff that made Peter’s throat lock up all of a sudden. He deviated from the script briefly. “That seems silly now, does it not?”
Peter wanted so badly to go up there right now and put his arms around Nik.
“By the time I came back...”
Booth had presented the crime scene photos to the court this morning. The amount of blood was staggering; there had been a terrible brutality to it, as if it hadn’t been enough for Stav to kill these people, as if he needed to destroy them. He kept thinking about Nik walking in and being the first one to find his family like that. He hated Stavros for it. He hated himself.
“Take your time,” Stu said gently.
Nik ploughed grimly ahead. “My wife and my brother-in-law had been shot. I called nine-one-one. Markos was dead already but Helena—she...I...” he winced. “I held her until the ambulance came. She died later, the doctors did what they could, but...” Nik finished, barely above a whisper.
A silence hung in the room, fragile and pregnant.
“Sorry,” Nik muttered, wiping away the wetness on his cheeks like he wasn’t quite sure how it got there.
“It’s okay, Nik,” Stuart said after a moment, his voice kind. “I’m sure very few of us in this courtroom today could even imagine the kind of tragedy that was visited on your family that night.”
Peter knew Booth was in a rhythm and was just about to bring this home. Between Nik’s earnest testimony and Stuart’s quiet sympathy, the jurors were rapt. All the same, Nik looked wrung out and shaky, and he wished Stu would request a recess. It was probably good he didn’t. Peter didn’t think Booth could stop him from loading Nik into his Jaguar right now and just driving until all of this bullshit was in the rearview mirror.
“Did you see anyone suspicious fleeing the scene?” Stuart asked. He’d been exaggerating hisoh-geezMidwestern accent the whole trial. Between that and the suits that were just a little too short at the wrists and ankles of his beanpole body, he had carefully curated a lovable underdog aura. Peter liked Booth about as much as he could like a lawyer, but he could never get used to how much of a game this all was.
“Objection, your honor,” brayed Stav’s lawyer, Galen Luskey, the Giannopouloses’ pet attorney. He wasn’t aiming at underdog. The guy looked slicker than olive oil on linoleum. “‘Suspicious’ and ‘fleeing’ implies guilt.”
“Sustained.” The judge looked at Booth. “Please reword the question, Counselor.”
“Did you see anyone out of place that night around your garage, Nik?” Stuart asked.
“I did. I passed a man running away from my shop in the alley.”
“And is that man in the courtroom here today?”
Nik nodded. “Yes.”
