She’d never stolen anything.
She’d worked double shifts and skipped meals and mended the same pair of sneakers three times, but she never stole.
Then Margaret took the stand.
She spoke about “sacrifice” and “family history” and the necklace her own mother had given her on her wedding day. She glanced at Clara twice, each time with a look like something unpleasant had crawled into the courtroom.
“Did you ever suspect Ms. Alvarez before the theft?” the prosecutor asked.
Margaret pursed her lips.
“She was… satisfactory at her job,” she said. “But one can never truly know people like that.”
“People like that,” Clara thought. “People like me.”
She felt Jenna tense beside her.
Adam testified next.
He looked uncomfortable in the witness chair.
“You trusted Ms. Alvarez, didn’t you?” the prosecutor asked.
“Yes,” Adam said. “She took good care of my son.”
“Yet you dismissed her,” the prosecutor pressed. “Why?”
Adam glanced at his mother.
“I… I couldn’t ignore the possibility,” he said. “The necklace disappeared. She was there. I didn’t want to believe it, but…”
His voice trailed off.
He didn’t look at Clara.
Ethan watched from the benches, eyes wide.
Part 2:
When it was Clara’s turn, her legs almost refused to move.
She walked to the stand, put her hand on the Bible, swore to tell the truth.
“What is your name?” Jenna asked gently.
“Clara Lucia Alvarez,” she replied.
“How long did you work for the Hamilton family?”
“Eleven years.”
“And in that time, were you ever accused of stealing anything?”
“No,” she said. “Never. Not until now.”
Jenna asked about her work.
Her pay.
Her life.
Her mother’s health.
The sacrifices she’d made to be there every day at 7:30 a.m.
Then she asked the important thing.
“Ms. Alvarez, did you steal the Hamilton necklace?”
Clara looked out over the courtroom.
At the judge.
At the jury.
At Adam.
At Ethan.
“No,” she said, voice steady. “I did not.”
“Did you ever handle the jewelry?”
“Only to dust the shelves around it,” she said. “The cases were locked. I didn’t know the combinations. I never asked.”
Jenna took a breath.
“Clara,” she said, dropping formalities for a second, “why are you fighting this so hard? You could have accepted a plea deal. You could have walked away with less risk to yourself. Why stand here, alone, against all of this?”
Clara swallowed.
“Because my name is all I have,” she said.
Her voice filled the room.
“I don’t have money. I don’t have power. I have my work and my honesty and the love of a little boy who used to call me family. If I accept a lie about me, that’s all I’ll ever be to anyone who hears this story. A thief. I won’t accept that. I would rather go to jail telling the truth than live free with everyone thinking I did something I did not do.”
The courtroom was silent.
Even the reporters stopped typing for a moment.
Clara’s eyes were wet, but she didn’t look down.
She held the judge’s gaze.
The judge nodded once, almost imperceptibly.
“Thank you, Ms. Alvarez,” she said. “You may step down.”
Clara returned to her seat, knees trembling, but head high.
When Jenna brought up the blackout in the security footage, the prosecutor tried to wave it away as “technical noise.”
The judge allowed it into the record, but shrugged.
“Absent evidence of tampering, it’s just a glitch,” she said.
It felt like a punch.
Clara’s one concrete “something’s wrong” had been reduced to an unfortunate error in a system she couldn’t afford to challenge.
By lunchtime, the case still leaned heavily toward the Hamiltons.
Money talks.
So do carefully curated reputations.
As they reconvened for the afternoon session, Clara felt a sinking certainty in her gut.
It wasn’t going to be enough.
Her words.
Her unpaid intern.
Her glitchy camera.
None of it stood up well against Victor Hale’s polished arguments and Margaret’s tears.
She sat at the table, staring at her folded hands, hearing only every third word of Hale’s closing speech.
“…tragic betrayal… irreplaceable heirloom… trust shattered…”
“—obvious motive.”
“—we ask that you convict.”
It was only when a shout echoed from the hallway that her head snapped up.
“Ethan!” someone hissed.
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