Chapter Thirty

The trial date was set for the following spring, and Melissa understood, reading the formal court scheduling notice at her own kitchen table on an otherwise entirely ordinary Tuesday morning, that this particular piece of administrative correspondence represented the final, proper conclusion of everything the last two years had demanded of her — a date, fixed and certain, after which Iain Blackwood would finally face, in open court, the full weight of what this investigation had spent so long, so carefully assembling against him.