Excerpt from PRESUMED GUILTY
AARON DOES NOT RETURN
September 15–16
Aaron does not return the next day. Bea comes back from school earlier than usual, and surges through the door, more upbeat than she’s been in days.“Where is he?” she asks.
When I shake my head, she stops in place.
“Did he call?” she asks.
“No call,” I say, “no text.” And of course, no email, a form of communication that Aaron and his age peers treat like a dead language. She falls into a chair.“Please,” she says. Please not the nightmare‐land we were living in a couple of years ago, when Aaron never failed to disappoint. She sits, silent and unmoving, for a few minutes, then pours herself a glass of wine and drifts down to the lake, where, from the broad windows of the living room, I can see her on an old park bench at the water’s edge, staring at the placid surface. I do not have the heart to remind her yet that we have a social obligation tonight, hosting a long‐delayed dinner for Bea’s deputy principal, Daria Lucci Zabatakis, to celebrate Daria’s fiftieth birthday. Instead, I decide to grant her a half hour alone.
I lived in this house, four bedrooms and all, by myself for several years after I acquired the place from my erstwhile lover, Lorna Mooney. Guilt-racked after telling me she was moving to California to marry someone else, she had offered me the place at a price I would have been foolish to refuse.
In response to Lorna’s announcement—her engagement and the house in the same agonized soliloquy—I chose my words with care. I didn’t want to say out loud that I was actually relieved, but I steadily maintained that her price essentially turned the house into a magnificent gift. Yet Lorna’s sons had moved on after their father’s death, and Lorna couldn’t imagine returning with her new husband while her former lover was living immediately behind her. Matt had left her oodles, and the new guy was also loaded. I, by contrast, could not ultimately forsake the chance to live with the view that for decades I had coveted. From our cabin, Barbara and I could glimpse only a fragment of the lake when our spring chairs were positioned just so on our front porch and the trees were bare of leaves.
I dwelled here for a few years, relishing the sight of the lake, serene in every season but a different shade each day, before I realized that the architecture of the house itself is not much to my taste. It was solidly built but getting older when Matt and Lorna bought it more than two decades before with the intent to knock it down and start again. They never got that far, because Matt’s business, like many contractors, was always cash-starved. The place is 1960s construction, which was a kind of dead zone in American design. The style is neither Modern nor rustic. The living room ceiling rises at a steep slant to make way for the impressive rock fireplace, and Matt made a smart choice by blowing out the wall that separated that space from the dining area and kitchen. But I don’t care for the thick mullions that turn the wall of windows facing the water into a checkerboard of two‑by‑three-foot panes, or the 1960s efficiencies elsewhere, like hollow-core doors, lower ceilings and walls of skimpy drywall. Bea and I talk about a significant renovation after we get married, but like our elusive wedding date, that is, so far, no more than talk.
By six thirty, Bea has dressed and put on a game face, and we are on our way to Como Stop. We rarely make plans for Friday nights when Bea is characteristically exhausted by the school week, but our date with Daria has been postponed so many times, starting with the pandemic, that both couples have sworn a blood oath to show up in the posh dining room of the Hotel Morevant on the shore of Como Lake. Daria is probably Bea’s closest friend locally, although their intimacy doesn’t rival Bea’s relationship with Neba Malone, Bea’s BFF since their freshman year of college.
Bea and Daria also met in college, during the second semester of Bea’s senior year at Wisconsin State. After Neba graduated early, Bea moved into her sorority house, where Daria and she were matched as roommates since they were both Education majors. When Bea became the principal in Mirror decades later, she recruited Daria to join her. Raised in a strict Italian home outside Kindle County, Daria can do a more convincing impression of the tough disciplinarian the kids sometimes require, and, in addition, has a knack with budgeting.
She is also a perfect companion for tonight, since she is relentlessly entertaining and generally relieves everybody else of the need to make conversation. She speaks at the speed of a bullet train, dropping frequent one-liners that fly past so fast you get only limited time to laugh. Her husband, Nick, a quiet CPA, nods and smiles, but rarely interrupts.
We are home by ten thirty. Bea, of course, has rushed into the house to find, a full day after last night’s text, that there is still no sign of Aaron. She imparts a lifeless kiss and announces she is turning in. I did not call the judge this morning, because I expected Aaron to show up any minute. Saturday or not, tomorrow I am going to have to track down Morton Sams.
I doze off in my recliner while simultaneously reading and watching a West Coast football game. I finally wake myself enough to go to sleep in our bed, only to feel, a few hours later, the sudden movement of Bea’s departure. I struggle to depart the floating craft of sleep but finally manage and find her with her hand still on the kitchen light switch. At the breakfast bar sits Aaron, who has been picking at a cold chicken breast I grilled a couple nights back. His other hand is over his eyes in the sudden glare.
Aaron is a striking young man, who considerable resemblance to Julian Bond, the activist and poet who used to get a lot of attention in the press decades ago. Ordinarily careful about his appearance, he looks somewhat rummaged tonight. His T‑shirt is grimy and for some reason he’s stepped out of his jeans, which are heaped in the doorway, while he sits on a highbacked kitchen stool in his briefs. After getting shorn to a prison buzz, he’s taken some pleasure in his hair, worn in a stylish high and tight, a low ’fro with shaved sides, the top recently dyed chartreuse, but he hasn’t noticed a twig enmeshed a few inches above his eyes. A streak of mud cuts across his throat, near his tattoo. Lloyd, Aaron’s father, regards body ink as an insult to the deity, but Aaron outflanked his dad a few years ago by having a six-inch gothic cross, outlined in blue, inscribed from the corner of his jaw almost to his shoulder. Lloyd could not complain, knowing that for Aaron, it was a sincere gesture. Since childhood, Bea says, Aaron has been steadfast in his faith. Bea herself is suspicious of all organized religion, save the Church of George Lucas, meaning she feels some Force, larger and more inscrutable than mere human intelligence can fully comprehend. Sadly I, by contrast, have never really experienced the presence of a higher being.
“Aaron, where the hell have you been?” she asks.
He sighs and finally says that it’s a long story.
“Well, we’d like to hear it,” she answers. “Except for a one-line text, we haven’t seen or heard from you since Monday. It’s Saturday now.”
“Barely,” he answers. He licks his fingers and presses the plastic top back onto the container. Then he climbs down from the stool. He is tall and lean. Dressed, he appears insubstantial, but when he’s in his skivvies, you can see he’s ripped. “I’ll tell you tomorrow. Right now, I’m just wasted. I need to crash.”
He takes a step toward the doorway and his mother cuts him off.
“No,” she says. “No. We’re all going to treat one another with respect. That’s what we said when you moved back in here. We promised the judge you’d stay in touch—or go back to jail. Where were you?”
This is as harsh as I’ve heard Bea be with Aaron, certainly since he’s lived here. She usually relies on the fact that Aaron, like any child, knows when she’s angry. In those moods, she tends to guilt him with practiced patience. Aaron’s grey eyes linger on his mother now. I can see he’s still thinking about stonewalling her.
“I was camping up north.”
“And how did you get there?” Bea says. “You didn’t ride your bike.”
“I was with Mae.”
Bea studies her son, rolling her jaw unconsciously. At least he’s telling the truth.
“I thought you and Mae were done with one another.”
“We are now,” he says.
“What happened? And why were you with her in the first place?”
He exhales deeply and takes a step back to perch his hind end on
the stool.
“We were talking about getting married,” he says. I realize immediately that Mansy’s remark about eloping did not come out of the blue. It was probably something Mae’s mom had shared as a deep dark secret. But I had not repeated that to Bea, understanding how panicked she’d have been by the notion. Now, she’s reduced to gap-jawed silence for a second.
“Married? You’re thinking of marrying Mae Potter? Talk about a beautiful mess. I don’t understand you, Aaron. I thought you realized how toxic this young woman has been for you.”
“I never said she was toxic. You said she was toxic, and I didn’t bother to fight. But, legit, it’s not going to happen, Mom, so, you know, chill. I’m done with Mae. But if you want to see why I didn’t say where I was going, look in the mirror.”
Subdued by this remark, Bea requires an instant to think.
“Were you using?” she asks.
“Negative, Commander.”
“Was Mae using?”
“Look. Mae’s gone. Forever. So you shouldn’t care what Mae was doing. We had a fight. We always have a fight, but this, you know, it was a mega fight, like clash of the titans. And we’re done. Done done.
Can I go to sleep now?”
He slides again toward the door.
Silent until now, I mention Gert and he nods.
“I saw her text. I told her I was on the way back, but I was hitchhiking so I didn’t know when I would get here.” Without driving privileges, Aaron often hitchhikes when he’s going a distance too long to bike and Joe is unavailable to chauffeur him. But his remark confuses Bea.
“Mae didn’t have her car?” she asks.
“Hey, Mom. Hear what I’m saying. We had this humongous fight. I was not going to sit in a vehicle with Mae for two hours while she ranted. And she probably would have pulled some power play and refused to drive back. So I thumbed. Only it wasn’t like hitching between Mirror and Como Stop, where a lot of people recognize me. Up north, there weren’t a lot of folks wanting to stop for a Black guy on the side of the road.”
Oddly, race is something Aaron almost never mentions when he’s talking to his mother. I don’t know if it’s a product of Lloyd’s ironclad insistence that being Black is never an excuse for anything, or the fact that Aaron thinks that for all his mother’s earnest empathy, she will never fully understand. But it’s one of those freighted subjects, like a few others, that is rarely addressed between them.
“I got rides eventually. But it like took forever. Last night I slept in a culvert. Tonight, I’d already snuck into a KOA, just to get running water, but there’s like a gas station/grocery just outside the gate. My debit card was pretty much flatlining, but I was so hungry that, around ten, I walked to the store to buy like a Slim Jim and I ran into Arden Mack from high school. He’s driving for a food delivery service—you know, on contract, in his own car. It was like torture sitting next to all those pizzas he was picking up and dropping off, but we got to Mirror about one and I walked from there because he had to make a delivery in Como Stop. So you know, it sucked. The whole time. But my life does, right?”
The note of occasional self-pity is one of Aaron’s least attractive traits. In his deepest depressions, he will tell you how things have gone against him from the start, when his birth parents didn’t have a place for him. There’s been a lot less of that since he entered the program with Reverend Spruce. Now he can see both Bea and me react to his remark, and he raises a hand.
“I’m just wasted,” he says. “And I’ve got to get up in like four hours. I promised Brice I’d help him.” His buddy Brice paints houses in the summer months and needs Aaron’s assistance with a backlog of jobs that is pressing now that the days of good weather are dwindling.
“And we have to stop at the Potters at some point, so I can return Mae’s phone.” He’s taken the device from his back pocket to show us.
Bea asks, “What are you doing with her phone?”
“It’s a story.”
“I’ll take it,” she says. “I have a meeting in Como Stop in the morning. I’ll drop it over there and save you boys the time.”
This is purely fictitious. Tomorrow is Saturday and we’ve already agreed to head the opposite direction to an excellent farmer’s market in a town called Granger. Just like me, Aaron sees through her immediately, realizing that his mother is simply trying to keep him away from Mae. He issues the tiny smile that is often his response, even when he thinks something is screamingly funny.
“I got it, Mom,” he says. “And I promise you, promise, you will never see Mae with me again.” A long sober look comes over him as he processes the gravity of that vow. He then knocks on the wall in parting and heads down the hall to his room.
Bea slides close and whispers, “What did you think of that?”
“Jesus, Bea,” I say. “What part? I don’t think he was using, if that’s what you mean.”
“No,” she says. “Married? And done with her? I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“He seems pretty certain,” I answer.
“And her phone? Why does he have her phone?” she asks.
“Let’s go to sleep, Bea,” I answer. “You can ask him about all of that tomorrow.” I take her hand and say what I surely mean. “Right now, I’ve had enough.”
FIRE
September 16
The bedroom I have shared for the past three years with Bea looks out on Mirror Lake. It sports the same floor‑to‑ceiling windows as the living room, including those thick mullions whose look I don’t care for. For the sake of the view, Lorna never bothered with window treatments, and I followed her example. The moon fractured on the lake and the profuse color of the sunsets are regular sights that sometimes make my heart like a quick bird flying through my chest.
Rising with the first light is not a problem around here on the weekdays when Bea is up early for school. On the other hand, since Aaron moved in, having no curtains on the bedroom windows has sometimes limited our privacy. Generally, he does not sleep well, and frequently when I’ve been roused in the middle of the night, I see his slim silhouette on the dock, where often he is sneaking a cigarette.
And it is smoke that wakes me—and fire. I sit straight up and eventually realize that Aaron is standing over the stone firepit in the rear yard, with flames doing their tortured dance. There is so much wrong about this scene, starting with building a fire at 4 a.m., that I put on a pair of jeans and a T‑shirt and head out. The one sign of the dwindling summer is the new coolness at night. I’m barefoot and my toes are chilled in the settling dew.
Primitively fixated on the fire, Aaron is too preoccupied to notice me until I am only a few feet away.
“Fuck,” he says. “I woke you up. I should have thought of that. Man, I really wasn’t trying to be a dick. I’m just so, you know—” He can’t find the words and I mutter something more kindly than I actually feel.
“I thought you were exhausted,” I say.
“Like so tired,” he answers. “I don’t know if I slept two hours next to the culvert. I was sure the cops would roust me, you know, Black vagrant or something. I need sleep so much, man, it hurts. But you know how sometimes it feels like there’s a floor underneath you that you can’t sink through?”
That sounds like he might be coming off something, but I keep that thought to myself. The test Gert will run on Monday will catch most anything.
Instead, we stand side by side at the fire, enjoying the heat and its mystical attraction. But even in the sporadic light, I can see the weight of weariness and worry on him.
“I’ve just got Mae on the brain,” he says, “you know, like going round and round. I’m so big mad and disappointed. I guess I never felt before that we’d totally for sure reached the end. So I just wanted to, you know, come out here and get done with all this stuff. Turn the page.”
In the fire, when I finally look down there, I recognize his backpack and sleeping bag.
“Those are expensive items, Aaron.”
“Tell me.” His laugh is a kind of murmur. “But you want to hear a story, man? You will not believe how totally fucked up this is.”
I nod a bit to show he has my full attention.
“Like, we went out there with this kind of understanding. We were going to get away and unplug. You know, turn off the phones. Just be into one another and talk this marriage thing through. Not get married today. But like, how could we get there? What had to happen and like what had to change?
“And instead, we didn’t even have the tent up on Tuesday, and Mae won’t do anything but take selfies and videos of herself. She’s got a new thing: She’s going to become some kind of influencer on Insta and TikTok. Like all of the sudden. Which I thought frankly was kind of pathetic and juvenile. I expected her to stop after a while. But she didn’t. So I finally was like, ‘What the fuck, man, that’s not why we’re here,’ and she promised to cut it out, and an hour later, she’s posing again with these stupid cutie-pie expressions. By the third day I finally flipped out. I grabbed the phone out of her hand and just kept walking. I didn’t even turn around for my backpack. I was just done, finally, so done. She ran after me screaming and going on about her phone and trying to snatch it back. I just kept moving.”
“Where were you?” I ask casually, hoping desperately he hadn’t left the county.
“Harold’s Woods,” he says. Far northern corner of Skageon County. Good news. “I’d walked about an hour from the park, and I was probably still a mile from 47, where I figured I could catch a ride, and I hear a car jetting down the dirt road behind me. I know even without seeing the Subaru who it is. I went ripping into the woods right there. There was no path or anything. I got all these scratches as I was crashing through the buckthorn.” He points to the inside of his arm. “But she saw me, I guess. She skids to a halt there and starts yelling. I’d gotten her up that morning to take the path to the Point to see the sunrise, and she’d thrown on this jeans microskirt and a tank top, so the way she was still dressed, she couldn’t follow me into the brush. Instead, she’s calling me names and daring me to come out. Finally, she goes back to the car. She’s got my backpack and is yelling that she’ll trade it for her phone. I’m about fifty yards away, crouched behind a rock, watching her. And you know, it was legendary stupid to leave the pack behind, especially the sleeping bag, because I’d realized by then that no way was I catching enough rides to get home that night. And I’ve got like zero cash, so I need the clothes and stuff in my pack, but I’m thinking like, No, I can’t. I can’t. I’m done. I know if I come out to talk to her, we’ll just start in again, it will be completely cray again in no time. So I stay put.
“Finally she shouts ‘Fuck you’ about a thousand times and then throws the backpack down and like straddles it. And I’m like, What now? But pretty soon I see she’s got her thong in her hand, and she’s kind of scooching around peeing all over the thing. She takes another minute to scream, I mean shriek at the top of her lungs, until she gets back in the car at last.
“I was afraid she’d double back, so I didn’t come out. The mosquitoes, that deep in the trees, I was like a tasty treat for all of them, but finally, after another twenty minutes, I was sure she was gone for good. My pack—I mean it’s completely disgusting. And it reeks. Like she peed pure ammonia. But you know, I need the thing. I can’t even imagine what I’m going to say about the smell, if I finally get a ride.
“The sleeping bag was soaked, which was partly why I had such a bad night yesterday.”
Because of the light of the fire, I can’t see much of the lake about thirty yards from us, but there’s a fresh wind off the water. Owls, a mated pair I never see, but whose gentle hootings often make their way into my sleep, are calling to each other now.
“That’s quite a story,” I say. “About Mae.” I hold my breath and ask, “Was she straight or high when that happened?”
“She’d been like completely baked for a day and a half by then,” he answers, truly downcast. It’s a second before he raises his eyes to see my look and adds, “Not me. Like I’d said really clearly before we left, ‘No drugs.’ But she still brought shit. I really felt swindled, man.” As a step to maintaining his sobriety, Aaron’s probation also requires him not to associate with drug users. “Not just because she didn’t give a shit about what she’d promised. But I’d been hoping for the good Mae. The good Mae, man, there’s nobody else I know like that, not even close. It’s kind of why I’ve been so totally hung up on her.”
I just nod.
“Did you ever get like that with somebody?” he asks. “You know— just can’t shake free?”
“Me?” I ask. Only so it nearly destroyed me, I think. Twice, actually. But I just answer yes.
“And what happened?”
I’ve never shared much of myself with Aaron. He’s somebody else’s kid, and was a troubled one at that by the time he arrived under our roof. I am also a little shy of a subject I’ve never spoken about in detail with his mother. But he’s never really asked for this kind of help before. And I’m willing to come through for him, not only because he’s the center of the world to someone I love, but because I’ve always been convinced there is real good in this young man. So I go on, with the firelight licking over both our faces, like a shifting mask.
“Truth? I got so carried away that I basically lit a fuse to my whole life, so that after the explosion I could only find a few random pieces here and there. Not to mention the so‑called collateral damage to the other people who got absolutely mauled in the process. Nothing good,” I say. “I have nothing good to say for myself.”
I look back on that man, Rožat K. Sabich the younger, as a madman. That’s not a euphemism either. I was out of my mind. Utterly desperate. Whoever I was in those moments with those women was the person I otherwise had no chance of being, someone on a thrill ride that would take me out from under the dark weight of my own life. Whatever Aaron had going with Mae—first love, pure love, big love—is miles more noble than my obsessions, which were nursed in secret.
“But I can tell you this straight from the heart. If you don’t go back to her, Aaron, if you really close the door on that part of your life, it will get better. Slowly. It’s like any other wound. It will heal. If you don’t keep reopening it. And yeah, I hear you. Mae’s not ordinary. Granted. And I won’t bullshit you. Maybe there’s a piece of what you had with her that you’re never going to have again. But consider the cost. Really. Somebody who will literally pee on your stuff, and you in the process? Somebody that ferocious and destructive? Way better to say goodbye.”
I get a long look in response. Then he worries his chin a little bit.
“Yeah but, like even now, I want to help Mae. Help her be, you know, not so extra, man. I think I can and she thinks I can. That’s always been a part of it. If she would ever let me.”
“Aaron, when I was young, I always thought what older people said to me, it was fake somehow, especially when they told me, ‘I know how you feel.’ But I do know how you feel. Barbara? Nat’s mom. She was like Mae in some ways. Super bright. And beautiful. But full‑on nuts. I did some really bad things to her, and she did even worse stuff to me, and we split. And then she tried to commit suicide. And I thought, That’s my son’s mother, I should take care of her. And that was like tying my leg to a big iron anchor and thinking I could swim. I nearly drowned instead. So I envy you. Because you’re way ahead of me. That is, if you realize what I should have, that you can’t love somebody back to sanity, or save them when they don’t want to be saved—if you accept that and don’t go back.”
“Won’t happen,” he says. “Lockdown guaranteed.” He nods looking into the fire, until it seems his mind has drifted to something else and, as sometimes happens, he musters a tiny furtive smile. “But one person who won’t think twice about Mae? My mom. She straight‑on hates her.”
“Hand to God, Aaron, I don’t think that’s true. She just doesn’t like what happens when you two are together. You don’t bring out the best in each other.”
“I don’t know, man. There’s some ripping good shit between Mae and me, and always has been. And my mom won’t see it, so she can never understand what’s been so hard for me.”
Ironic or not, some of the nicest things I ever heard said about Mae came from Bea, who’d taught Mae in third grade. She described an unusually precocious, charming little girl, adored by everybody, classmates and teachers. She loved being the center of attention, like a lot of kids, but she knew how to coax it from people, rather than simply demanding they pay heed. She wrote a play and the music—much of it admittedly lifted from songs she heard on FM—and got her whole class to perform it, while Mae sang at the piano, off-key but exuberant. ‘You see that,’ Bea said to me a while back, ‘where a happy high-achieving kid gets to adolescence and is like a tire that goes flat. Charmaine’s illness may have been part of it, I guess. You never know. Life is so chancy.’
Watching Mae has always reminded me of a leaf turning on the breeze, drifting without any predetermined direction, but graceful, nonetheless. She often dresses entirely in white, which has struck me as a subtle statement, but may only be an effort to match her frothy light straw-colored hair, which is always blowing around her face.
Observing Mae, I have wondered, if I were Aaron’s age, how long it would take me to realize she is deeply unsettled. She has a lot of easy charm with everyone, but the occasionally forced gestures, her emphatic laughter, the way her hands fly around her, have seemed to conform to somebody else’s idea of how she should behave.
Even so, like everyone else, I’ve been struck by Mae’s smarts. I know her principally through Mansy’s and Aaron’s stories about her, but she often impressed me in our sporadic face‑to‑face contact. When Bea and I had just started our romance, I came over one Friday night while Aaron and a group of his high school friends were on the back porch of the apartment Bea was renting. The kids were hooting and yelling at each other about some young man, a sailor they’d met on a trip into Kweagon. One of the females insisted he was not in uniform, which left her no way to explain why she thought he was in the navy. At that point, Mae came into the kitchen for water.
‘Don’t you think,’ Mae asked me, as she stood by the tap, ‘you can tell so much about people by the details they notice, what they think is important and then sticks in their memories? It like tells you everything about them.’
I didn’t answer, because I was so struck. It was not something I’d ever articulated to myself.
“But truth, with my mom?” Aaron says now. “That went two ways. Mae always talked a lot of shit about her, too.”
“What kind of shit?”
“Oh, you know. I thought she was so cool and, you know, moral, and she wasn’t.”
“Anything more specific?”
“She was vague. I always thought she was bullshitting.” He looks away.
For a kid who’s been in his share of trouble, Aaron is a bad liar. But I’m not going to press. Like a lot of manipulative people, Mae knew how to spread the currents of discontent, relishing the sense of power it imparted.
Whatever Aaron suspects or doesn’t want to say silences him. I turn toward the house, then pause and gesture to the fire.
“Make sure that’s out, please, before you go back in.”
“Sure sure,” he says.
I look at him, my would‑be stepson, and drift back to put my arm around him. It’s been decades since Nat was this age and I embraced a young man this way. His solidity, like a well-constructed house, communicates a strength in Aaron I otherwise seldom feel. He’s built for survival and has already surmounted a good deal. With any luck this will be another passage from which he emerges better set for the future.
“It’ll be okay,” I say.
“I don’t know,” he answers. “Sometimes I have this feeling in the pit of my stomach, like how do I actually go forward? Why did I do that anyway? And then I remember that there was no real choice. I will never be who I can be if I don’t get away from Mae.”
His mother and his grandfather would nod enthusiastically. ‘He gets it now,’ they’d say. ‘He’s stumbling but will find his footing in time.’ I tell him again that it will be okay, then head inside.
Excerpt from PRESUMED GUILTY by Scott Turow. Available for pre-order wherever books are sold.
“No one does it better.”―David Baldacci, #1 NYT Bestselling Author
“The truth is, Turow is just better at this than the rest of us.”―Greg Iles, #1 NYT Bestselling Author
“This is manna for legal-thriller fans."―Booklist, starred review
“This easily ranks among Turow’s best."―Publishers Weekly, starred review
“An absorbing and entertaining read.” ―Kirkus
Rusty is a retired judge attempting a third act in life with a loving soon-to-be wife, Bea, with whom he shares both a restful home on an idyllic lake in the rural Midwest and a plaintive hope that this marriage will be his best, and his last. But the peace that’s taken Rusty so long to find evaporates when Bea’s young adult son, Aaron, living under their supervision while on probation for drug possession, disappears. If Aaron doesn’t return soon, he will be sent back to jail.
Aaron eventually turns up with a vague story about a camping trip with his troubled girlfriend, Mae, that ended in a fight and a long hitchhike home. Days later, when she still hasn’t returned, suspicion falls on Aaron, and when Mae is subsequently discovered dead, Aaron is arrested and set for trial on charges of first-degree murder.
Faced with few choices and even fewer hopes, Bea begs Rusty to return to court one last time, to defend her son and to save their last best hope for happiness. For Rusty, the question is not whether to defend Aaron, or whether the boy is in fact innocent—it’s whether the system to which he has devoted his life can ever provide true justice for those who are presumed guilty.