Everything

XIII

TW//: Sensitive Topic briefly covered - precaution. 

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Forty-eight hours.

If you try hard enough, you can write a short story in that length of time. When I was ill as a child, it was in that length of time that I stayed home to recover. Nearly 3,000 minutes of time. You could move mountains in that time.

But in the last 48 hours, all I'd accomplished was making myself tired.

I hadn't slept in the last 48 hours and it was all down to a case. A case I never thought would resurface again. A case that was all my fault.

The second case I had worked on alone, when I was 22 years old had been the toughest I'd experienced then, and one of the most difficult to think about even now.

It involved a family, a family from the other side of New York, one no one had ever heard of, your average Joes. But this case was more than at first met the eye.

It all started when a 14-year-old girl had rocked up at my new office in floods of tears. She was the prettiest little girl I'd ever seen: blonde and blue-eyed, she had a face like a fairy and was so petite she looked as if she could break. Traumatised at a poor young girl who, when it came down to it, wasn't much younger than me, born in the same decade, I had ushered her in to sit with me. There, she proceeded to explain how her father, divorced from her mother, had assaulted her on multiple occasions when she had gone to stay at his house. Her mother had found out after finding her bleeding.

I was horrified. Of course I was, who wouldn't be? And the case had escalated from there. I'd approached Webster, but he'd let me take the case alone, citing other commitments. The case progressed and I was told the most disturbing evidence I had ever heard, about what this man had allegedly done. I'd even watched as this young girl, so sweet and innocent, had broken down in court, describing her harrowing ordeal.

The father had gone down for the crime. I'd made sure of that when I ripped him to pieces in court, making him look unstable, predatory and cruel. Because he was. 10 years in one of the toughest maximum security prisons in America. He'd become a notorious criminal whilst on trial and the media, Spencer's paper specifically, had reported on how the other criminals had heard about what this man had done to his daughter, and had beat him to within an inch of his life.

Boone and Webster, so pleased with my performance on the case, had given me a pay rise and promoted me to a higher rank in the organization immediately.

I was happy. Everyone was. I got more recognition and a disgusting man got what he deserved.

Or so I thought.

Until Monday morning when the same pretty little girl I once knew, now aged 19, had knocked on my door and proceeded to tell me that the whole thing had been one massive and elaborate lie.

I had spat my morning coffee all over my keyboard.

It was a lie, she had told me, a lie to protect her boyfriend, a high school senior with a bright future in football, from going down for statutory r*pe. They were having a relationship – sometimes he was rough with her, she said – hence the physical evidence that pointed towards her father - but it didn't stop her from loving him. It was only now, now they had continued their relationship, now she was pregnant with his child, now that he'd left her without so much as a glance back, that she had realised the true impact of what she had done.

I'd then proceeded to calmly walk to the bathroom and then, without much control, had ridded myself of my breakfast into the toilet bowl.

I was in shock. I'd sent a man down nearly five years ago for a crime he hadn't committed. An innocent man was sitting in prison for something that he had never done.