Proven Guilty (Treadmill III)

XIII

I'm not going to take you through the things you don't care about.

Going into the Wyoming police, getting carted back to South Carolina, both being considered flight risks and forced to stay in the same jail as Lydia until our trial. Brianne agreeing to be my lawyer again, after a lot of crying and pleading and promises to never try and escape from jail again on my part.

That may seem like a cop-out to some of you. Not providing all the details, taking the easy way out, and keeping that information to myself.

Do you honestly think that I, of all people, care what you think? Not likely.

Luckily, being an accomplice to murder isn't punishable by death, so there was no danger of being shot by a firing squad. The most they were aiming to give me was five years in jail with the chance for parole in two, and Brianne, ever the optimist, was shooting for 6 months total.

Maybe I'll take you back to the day of closing arguments. I didn't get those in my first trial, so this one seemed like it could be fun. Rebecca and I were codefendants, completely separate from my sociopath of a stepmother, and the state had agreed to leave my previous mistrial as a mistrial, so this was it. I was being tried as an accomplice to murder, and nothing more.

Let's go to that day of closing arguments. I do love to spin a good story.

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Thursday, March 25th, 2021.

Kennedy didn't know what outcome her stepmother was facing, and she didn't know that she quite cared. She was sure that the state had a good case against Lydia, despite her vast resources (or Kristopher's vast resources) to hire the best lawyer possible and get her the best sentence money could buy.

It was funny. Kristopher hadn't cared at all when his daughter was on trial the first time or locked up the second; but now that his child bride of a wife was facing consequences for her actions, he had been front row every day of the trial, for both Lydia and Kennedy. Kennedy suspected he was only watching her own trial so that he could report back to Lydia about the progress at the end of each day, as if her lawyer's team wasn't already doing that.

Kennedy had stopped caring about her father's decisions and how he treated her a long time ago. But the silver lining of her second trial and the publicity of it was that the rest of her family had come to support her.

She couldn't remember the last time she had seen Jeremy and Anna, or even her mother. Life had felt so lonely and hectic since Hank, and having her family so close during this trial, when she knew she would be getting zero support from her father, made everything feel just a little bit better.

Their prosecutor was a new ADA, Michelle Potter, who wouldn't have a conflict of interest in trying the murder of a former ADA. She was a middle-aged woman who hadn't attempted to slut-shame anyone in the courtroom, which was more than could be said for her predecessor. The judge was different as well—an older man with wiry glasses and hair so white it looked dyed. Kennedy missed Judge Adamson.

The state went first. Brianne sat in between Kennedy and Rebecca at the defense table, staring straight at ADA Potter's back as she addressed the jury.

"No one in this room is denying that Kennedy Abrams and Rebecca Eaves have had a rough few months. In Miss Abrams' case, a rough few years. But struggling does not excuse assisting in the coverup of a cold-blooded murder. Many of us struggle on a daily basis, but we do not solve our problems by killing their perpetrators. We do not live in a world where we are justified in taking the law into our own hands, no matter how much we may feel that we have earned the right to do so. We do, however, live in a world where we must face the consequences of our actions, and where we will hopefully be made better people for it.