The hearing was on a Thursday in October. Room 214 of the Bell County Justice Center in Belton.
Teresa had filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. She explained it to me three times in her office, drawing little boxes and arrows on a legal pad. The short version was this: a person can’t sue you just for reporting a crime to the police in good faith. And she was going to ask the judge to throw the whole thing out.
“Will it work?” I asked.
“It should,” Teresa said. Then she paused. “But I’ve learned not to promise anything until the judge says it.”
I wore my good navy dress. The one I wore to Harold’s funeral. I hadn’t worn it since. I put on the pearl earrings he gave me for our fortieth anniversary and I sat in the hard wooden pew on the right side of the courtroom, and I held my purse in my lap so tight my knuckles went white.
Wayne Haller sat on the left side of the courtroom.
It was the first time I’d seen him since the parking lot. He looked different. Clean-shaven. Fresh haircut. A blue suit that fit him well enough. A tie with little anchors on it. He looked like a Sunday school teacher.
He looked over at me once. Just once. His eyes were flat and cold, like a snake on a warm rock.
Then he smiled.
My stomach turned over.
Bradley Strand sat next to him. Silver hair, a gray suit that probably cost more than my car, a leather briefcase with gold clasps. He didn’t look at me at all. I wasn’t worth looking at, to him.
The judge came in. The Honorable Patricia Lindgren. Sixties, short gray hair, half-moon glasses on a chain. She sat down and looked over the courtroom like a schoolteacher counting heads.
“We’re here on the defendant’s motion to dismiss in Haller versus Bixby,” she said. “Mr. Strand, you may respond.”
Bradley Strand stood up and buttoned his jacket.
He talked for twenty minutes. He was good. I’ll give him that. He had a voice like warm syrup.
He talked about the sacred bond between a father and his child. He talked about how Mr. Haller had simply wanted to spend an afternoon with his little girl, and how a confused elderly store employee had turned a loving outing into a nightmare. He held up a copy of the birth certificate. He held up Wayne’s driver’s license.
“Ms. Bixby was shown proof, Your Honor. Legal proof. And she chose to ignore it. She chose to humiliate my client in front of dozens of strangers, chase him into a parking lot, and photograph him and his daughter like criminals.”
He turned and looked at me for the first time. His face was full of fake sympathy.
“I don’t doubt Ms. Bixby meant well. But meaning well doesn’t give anyone the right to destroy a father’s reputation.”
I wanted to stand up. I wanted to yell. Teresa put her hand flat on my arm under the table.
“Wait,” she whispered.
Then Bradley Strand called Wayne Haller to say a few words.
Wayne stood up. He put his hand on his heart.
“Your Honor,” he said, and his voice cracked just right, “all I ever wanted was to be a dad to my little girl.”
That’s when the door at the back of the courtroom opened.
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