Chapter 17 — THE TRIAL

The criminal trial was in September, eleven months after.

Assault in the first degree, and assault on a pregnant woman resulting in termination of pregnancy — that count was dismissed before trial because my pregnancy did not terminate, my daughter was born alive and healthy, and the statute is written the way it is written.

Ozick ran the only defence available: that I tripped.

He had my sleep medication. He had my grief counselling. He had the 2021 stair survey. He had four witnesses who had seen me be unsteady, three of whom were being honest.

He had, in the end, one problem, and her name was Rosalind Neto.

She was on the stand for two hours and ten minutes and he could not move her one inch.

He asked her whether she could really be sure of what she saw from thirty feet.

She said: "I was thirty-one feet away. I measured it with a tape after, because I knew somebody would ask me this."

He asked her whether it was possible my feet had moved and she had not noticed.

She said: "Her feet did not move. I have thought about her feet every night for eleven months."

He asked her whether she was testifying because she was angry about her visa.

And Roz Neto, twenty-seven years old, in a courtroom, in her third language, looked at a jury and said: "I am testifying because I signed a paper about a fall once before without reading it, and I have not slept properly since I found out what it was for."

The 911 call went in whole.

They played all nine minutes and forty-one seconds.

I watched the jury during the part where Margot says you work for me, hang up the phone or don't come back, and I watched them during the two and a half seconds of silence, and I watched them during then I don't come back, and I knew at that moment, sitting in the second row, that it was finished.

They were out for four hours.

Guilty on the first-degree count.

She was sentenced in November to eleven years, suspended after six, with five years probation.

She was fifty-six.

I was in the room. I gave a victim statement, which I wrote nine times and delivered badly.

The only part of it I would keep is the last line, which I did not plan and which came out of me because she had looked at the floor for the entire eleven minutes.

I said: "Margot. Her name is Wren."

She did not look up.