Over a month had passed before the day finally came that they both had been dreading. After talking to her father's attorney, Kate had realized that there was only one way to get her father out of jail, and that was to testify. For the sake of getting her father free, for a heart warming family picture, the writer dressed his daughter in a reasonable navy dress, threw a suit on himself, packed up the diaper bag equipped for both Alexis and Henry, and headed out with his wife's hand in his own. Her mother's necklace dangled in front of her high-necked blouse and navy blazer which matched her slacks quite well, and she couldn't stop twisting the thing anxiously for the entire car ride to the courthouse. By the time they got inside, Henry was reasonably wide awake, and Kate was a nervous wreck.
"You'll do fine," the writer promised her as she sat on the bench, her knee bouncing endlessly.
She then answered, "I think I'm going to throw up."
Rick slightly laughed. "You've been preparing for weeks, you're in a courtroom, which is the one place in which I know you are highly experienced and completely comfortable, and you have us for good luck. Besides, like the attorney said, there is next to nothing you could say that would do any harm. He's going to lead you through his questions, and then they are going to attempt to ask questions that will do nothing but waste their time."
"What if this was a bad idea? What if I say something stupid?"
"You won't," he promised. Kate breathed, definitely finding zero comfort in her fiance's certainty.
It was then that the defense called their first witness of the day. When Kate wandered toward the stand and was sworn in, all she could do was feel the world moving at the pace of a glacier while managing to rush through the seconds as though they were non-existent. Her mind could only question itself on how she got to where she was. She could only review the past year of her life in complete disarray. How could everything turn out like this?
One year ago to this day, she was staring at the bottom of a glass in her roommate's bedroom, and both were hungover from the night before. They were talking about how much their first Thanksgivings home after leaving for college were going to be such nightmares. Going home, seeing the family, and having to be fawned over for a short while all sounded miserable to them at the time. Now, she would have given anything to be going home for Thanksgiving with her mother. She would give anything for her mother to be able to meet her fiancé and her son. If only she had known then that she would be where she was. If only she knew that today, the day before her twentieth birthday, not quite two weeks before Thanksgiving, she would want her mother more than she had ever wanted anyone, she might not have taken that turkey dinner for granted.
"Miss Beckett, how are you today?"
"I'm fine," Kate replied, seeing that the attorney was trying to make her somewhat comfortable.
The man then nodded, "Good. And you're my client's daughter, is that correct?"
"Yes."
"So... You were the one who was originally attacked on the day in question, correct?"
"Yes," Kate replied, starting to feel discomfort seep in.
The man then prompted, "Could you tell us about that day? What were you doing at your father's home so early?"
"I was checking on him, trying to see how he was doing. He hadn't been out of rehab for very long and- we hadn't heard from him in a little while, so... I thought I would go see him and make sure that he was still sober."
"And when you got there, what did you find?"
This caused Kate to look up from the lawyer. Her eyes came to rest on her father's, who was clearly in pain, and she watched him for a moment. She then had to look at her lap just to get his face out of her mind, and she was finally able to look at the attorney again. "I found his front door open, so I went inside. My dad was passed out on the chair with a bottle of booze in his hand, and I went to wake him up."
"Were you alone?"
"No, the man who had driven me there had come inside with me."
The attorney then glanced at the taxi driver, questioning Kate, "Had you asked him to walk up with you, or had you invited him onto the property at all?"
Kate then looked at the man who had only really been trying to protect her and explained, "I was eight months pregnant at the time, and I had told him that something didn't seem right, but I never asked him to come with me. In fact, when I got to the front door and it opened, he stepped in front of me without saying a word and walked inside."
"And then what happened?"
"I passed him again to go check on my dad, and-... he was passed out on the couch." This brought Kate's eyes to her father's once again as pain consumed her. Rick looked at his fiancé, holding their baby boy in one arm and their little girl beneath his other as she colored in her coloring book, and he could, for the first time, see how extremely deep Kate's father had managed to wound her. Yet- despite everything he had done to her, she still was here to help him. She was willing to go through all of this pain for him. And yet- she could barely talk about her father without a twinge of pain. She was incredible for doing this, he just wished she didn't have to.
The lawyer then looked between Kate and her father, seeing her pain reflected in her eyes, and asked, "What happened when you went to check on your father?"
She breathed, her chest tightening, her heart aching. "He was asleep, so... I went to wake him up." The memory choked her, taking her in its grip, causing her to pause a moment. As she took command of herself, she strengthened her body, refusing to let herself crack, and she told the court, "I went to wake him up, and I had been standing in front of him. When he woke, he was out of it. He was in a haze and completely confused. He screamed at me to, quote, 'Get off of her,' and he pushed me. My body fell into the brick wall, most of that impact going to my side, which included the initial impact of my stomach. I hit my head, and fell to the floor, just barely catching sight of my driver trying to calm my father and push him away."
"So, to be clear, the driver went at your father willingly?"
"Yes."
"And he hadn't been invited into your father's home by anyone who lived there currently?"
"No, he hadn't."
"So, what I'm hearing is that he went into a strange man's home, willingly fought against the man, and then went on to press charges he had no grounds to press?"
"Yeah. That's-... exactly what happened."
The attorney then looked at the jury and judge, telling them, "I have no further questions."
With that, the prosecutor stood and took his turn. From his very first question, Kate got a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach. "Miss Beckett, how old are you?"
"Nineteen."
"And you just lost your mother this past year, is that correct?"
Kate swallowed, admitting, "Yes, I did."
"And that was when your father began drinking?"
Beckett sighed, looking at her father, remembering for a moment that first time she saw him drink himself into oblivion. "Yes. That's-... Yes."
"Now... When you were attacked, remind me, you were how far along?"
She looked over toward the infant in her lover's arms and then flashed back to the man before her. "I was about eight months pregnant with my son who came out of this completely unharmed."
"But you were forced to deliver him premature, correct?"
"Yes," Kate reluctantly replied.
"Had your father ever hit you before that night?"
Again, Kate swallowed, this time looking directly at the man she loved, holding his pool blue eyes with a deep, seething pain in her chest. This time, though she kept her composure, it was far harder for her to utter the word, "Yes." Quickly, she then defended. "It was only once before he went to rehab and I wasn't hurt."
"But he was drunk then too," the man question.
"Yes."
"And you were, what, five or six months along at that point?"
"Yeah."
"So, a drunk man, who had a history a violence, hit an eight-months pregnant nineteen year old girl so hard that she goes flying into a wall because he is in a dazed state brought on by alcohol exposure, and you expect that a kind, strong man will just standby and watch as you are attacked? Would your fiancé have wanted this man to do nothing to protect his future-wife and unborn child?"
Kate once again looked to her husband as the defense attorney stood to call, "Objection. Witness cannot testify to what someone else may or may not have wanted."
"I'll rephrase," the lawyer replied. "Miss Beckett, would you have us believe that, under these circumstances, given the uncertainty of your safety had this man not intervened, that you would have rather been alone in that house?"
"Yes," Kate firmly stated.
The man scoffed. "Why? How do you know he wouldn't have hurt you?"
"Because I know him. I know he would have woken up. I know he's not vicious or violent. He wouldn't hurt me intentionally. Not without some kind of cause. He would never hurt me or my son, and- he was waking up. And if that man hadn't jumped in and scared my father, if he hadn't been in any way provoked, I would have been absolutely fine. He would have called an ambulance just as fast, and better yet, we wouldn't be sitting here fighting assault charges the man had no place filling. If he was there to protect me, then the best thing he could have done was let the two bruises heal and let me and my family move on with our lives."
The prosecutor then stopped and breathed for a moment. Kate's pulse was astronomically fast and she could barely feel herself breathing. She looked at the defense lawyer, then her father, and then her family. All were satisfied. Then, the prosecuting attorney took his time studying Kate for a moment before he began again, "Miss Beckett, are you aware that forty percent of violent crimes are committed while under the influence of alcohol?"
Kate then swallowed. "No, I was not aware of this, but-."
"And two-thirds of violent assaults committed between family members, loved ones, and friends were reported to have involved alcohol, did you know that?"
"Not until now, but-."
"Seventy percent of alcohol related incidents happen in the home, Miss Beckett. Were you aware of this?"
"No, but who knows that stuff off the top of their head?"
"I do," the man stated. He then took a step back from the stand which he had approached, and upon looking back on the driver, he was brought to a new question. "How many times had your father hit you before your mother died and he was drinking?"
Kate breathed. "Once when I- I crossed a line in an argument with my mother. He got home, she told him about it, he made me repeat what I said to him and then he slapped me across the cheek barely hard enough to hurt."
"And-... in the eleven months it's been since your mother died, he's hit you... Twice?"
"Yes," Kate muscles out. "He's been in pain and- he wasn't dealing with all of this very well."
"You were in pain," the man stated, looking her dead in the eye. "You are nineteen years old, your mother was murdered, and your father was drinking himself into the ground. You then started a relationship and shortly after that, you got pregnant. You are a nineteen year-old college student with a newborn son, a pile of medical bills, and all of the repercussions from this past year have weighed on you."
"Is there a question here," the defense attorney called out.
The man before Kate, who had managed to cause her emotions to well up and just barely stay behind the barricades in her eyes then questioned, "Wouldn't it be fair to say that you don't know who your father is anymore? Wouldn't it be fair to say that the man you once knew, the strong, caring, wholesome man you once knew has disappeared and become someone unrecognizable to you?"
Without really thinking, Kate answered in a trance, "Yes," as a single tear slipped from her eye and rolled down her cheek, her voice muffle by heartache.
With this, the defense lawyer was then able to ask, "Then how did you expect this man who had never even met your father to know that you weren't in any danger, assuming you weren't?" Kate then sat silently, her mouth falling open as noises popped out of her throat. She was looking for an answer, but instead found that her whole body had betrayer her, mind and all. The lawyer seemed to notice as he watched her, and finally, when she could no longer look up and face the world, he backed down and stated, "No further questions."