The jury box was empty and somebody had pushed all fourteen chairs in neatly, as though the jurors might come back for their coats. Omar stood at the defence table with his hand on the back of Danny's chair while the clerk read the case number into the record. It was Friday, the fourteenth of May, and the courtroom smelled of floor polish and somebody's umbrella.
Moss did it the way he did everything, slowly and in order. He noted for the record that independent counsel had met with the defendant on two occasions to advise him about his attorney's conduct, and that the defendant had chosen to keep Mr. Haddad. He asked Danny whether that was still his choice.
"Yes, sir."
"Mr. Haddad."
"Your Honor, the defence withdraws its notice of insanity."
He had drafted the sentence on Wednesday night and found nothing in it to argue with. That was new. For four months every sentence he wrote had arrived with a second sentence attached, explaining why it was the right one.
Moss put Danny under oath and took him through it. The right to a jury, which he was giving up. The right to make the People prove every element beyond a reasonable doubt. The right to testify or stay silent, to confront the witnesses against him, to call his own. Kline stated the agreement: a plea to second-degree murder, a sentence of twenty-five to forty years. Moss told Danny the maximum the law allowed for that charge was life, and asked whether anyone had promised him anything else or threatened him or told him what to say.
"No, sir. Nobody told me what to say."
"Then tell me, in your own words, what you did on the ninth of January."
Danny stood. He didn't look at Omar. He turned, slowly, until he was facing the second row of the gallery, where Amal sat in black with her handbag in her lap. Omar saw Moss see it and let it go.
"I was in the kitchen at our house on Calhoun Street. My brother Sami was at the stove. I took the knife out of the drawer by the sink. I put it back. Then I took it out again, and I stabbed him, and he died on the floor before the ambulance came."
Amal didn't move. Her fingers stayed on the clasp of her handbag. Behind her, against the back wall, Tess had come in late and stood with her coat still buttoned, watching the back of Danny's head.
"I heard a voice for a long time, Mama. Since the summer. It didn't make me. It asked me, and I said yes. I sent Rami that message in December and I meant it. And in the jail, Sheikh Farran told me to scream so he could film it, so I screamed. Nothing came out of me." He swallowed. "Sami didn't steal the house. Dad left it to him to keep for you. I knew that. I knew it the whole time."
The court reporter's hands kept moving after he'd stopped.
Moss found a factual basis. He accepted the plea and set sentencing for the eighteenth of June. Then he sent word to the jury room that the jurors were discharged with the thanks of the court, and he took off his glasses.
"Mr. Haddad. I'm referring your conduct of this defence to the Attorney Grievance Commission. You'll receive a copy of my letter." He put the glasses back on. "You'll also be standing next to your client at sentencing. Finish the case."
"Yes, Judge."
Kline packed her files without a word to him. At the rail she stopped. She rested two fingers on the defence table beside his hand, the way you might touch a car you had watched go off the road, and then she went out.
Amal caught him at the lifts. She had her handbag in both hands and she held it between them, so that he couldn't have taken her hand if he'd tried.
"You told me not to tell anyone," she said. "About the house. When you were teaching me what to say. You said, don't tell anyone now."
"I did."
"He said it in January. To the police, to the judge, to you. 'It told me to.' And everybody said, poor boy, he's sick." She looked past him at the lift doors, at their two blurred shapes in the steel. "You should have let him say all of it then. It would have been the same twenty-five years, and I would have had four months less of hoping."
The lift opened. She got in without him, and the doors closed on her black coat.
At half past four the next morning Schaefer Road was empty in both directions, wet from rain he hadn't heard fall. Omar parked where he had parked in April, under the streetlight with the dead bulb, and sat with the engine ticking.
You don't have to. Nobody's expecting you. It won't help with the Commission, if that's what this is.
This close to dawn it came thinner, or he was more tired. It sounded less like him and more like somebody explaining him to a third party. He got out of the car. The sky over the roofs of Dearborn had gone from black to the colour of wet slate, and there was a light on in the mosque's front window.
The door of his father's mosque stuck at the bottom, as it always had. Inside it smelled of carpet and rosewater and the paraffin heater the old men refused to give up. Seven or eight of them were already there, in coats and cardigans, standing about in their socks. At the front, his back to the room, his father stood facing the wall that faced Mecca.
He had last stood in a row in this room three days after the funeral, at this same hour, with his forehead on the old carpet, thinking that she was in the ground and this was a floor. The carpet was new now. His father had never once asked him why he stopped.
He took his shoes off and put them in the wooden rack by the door, in an empty cubby between a pair of slippers and a child's trainer. He stood in his socks with his coat on. He didn't know where to put himself. The rows had already formed. There was a gap at the end of the second one wide enough for a man, and he didn't go to it.
An old man with a white cap gave the call to prayer from the front, in Arabic, without a microphone, his voice cracking on the high notes. Omar had known the words since before he could read. While it went on, the voice in him had nothing to add. It wasn't gone. It was waiting, the way a man waits in a corridor for a meeting to finish.
His father raised his hands and began. He recited aloud, as the dawn prayer is said, in the voice Omar had grown up under: not loud, a little hoarse, every word given its full length. After the opening chapter he went on into another, and Omar knew it before the second line. Ibrahim. He'd read it in English at fourteen, in a green paperback translation with his father's pencil in the margins, because the prophet Ibrahim's prayer for his children had seemed like the sort of thing a son should know.
His father reached the verse and didn't slow down for it.
Omar heard the English arrive in his own head, in his own voice, the way everything had arrived since January: whole, sure of itself, a little ahead of him. His father's Arabic went on underneath it, unhurried.
"And Satan will say when the matter has been concluded, 'Indeed, Allah had promised you the promise of truth. And I promised you, but I betrayed you. But I had no authority over you except that I invited you, and you responded to me. So do not blame me; but blame yourselves.'"
At the front the men bent together into the bow, a row of backs in coats and cardigans.
Omar stood by the shoe rack. He undid the top button of his coat, then the rest, and took it off.