Shame heated her cheeks. Nervous, guilty, she licked her lips. “Yes,” she whispered, then sat forward, closer to the mic, and said it again. “Yes. At the beginning of the project, he was married. By the end, his divorce had started, but I’m ashamed to say we did not wait for it to be final before our romance began.” She shot a look at the judge, who stared stoically at her from his bench. “I can look back and see where I went wrong at every turn.”
Wanting to believe she saw some semblance of understanding and possibly even sympathy in his eyes, she sat back in her chair and answered the questions as they came. So far, the defense attorney sitting next to Tyrone hadn’t said a word. Sooner than she hoped, the questioning turned to that horrible night in September.
“You’ve said that Tyrone had assaulted you before that night.”
The defense attorney didn’t even look up from his legal pad and in a bored voice, he interrupted, “Objection. Facts not in evidence.”
The prosecuting attorney raised his eyebrows then addressed the judge. “Your honor, I’m not sure it would help the defense one iota to open that can of worms, but if he insists, we can enter all kinds of those facts into evidence.”
The judge smirked and gestured toward the defense attorney with his gavel. “What say you, Esquire?”
“Withdrawn, your honor.”
The prosecuting attorney gave a significant look to each of the members of the jury. He then turned back to Valerie and asked, “What was different about what happened that afternoon of September eighteenth?”
Like a slide show on super speed, images flew through her mind; snapshots of that horrible afternoon. “I’d decided that I didn’t want to be involved with Tyrone anymore. The abuse had long since gone beyond verbal, and he’d started hitting me. Especially when he drank.”
She licked impossibly dry lips and cleared her throat. “I had enough of myself left to see what was happening to me, and I decided to get out. I applied for a transfer inside my company and accepted a job, a promotion actually, that would move me to Atlanta. I thought I’d leave without Tyrone ever knowing my plans. But an interoffice memo email went out congratulating me on my transfer. As soon as I saw it, I rushed home to pack and leave, but he’d already read it. He’d been waiting for me in the parking lot of our apartment building and followed me inside. He was very drunk.”
She paused, her voice shaking. Oh, what she wouldn’t give for a sip of water! The prosecuting attorney put his hand on the divider in front of her and leaned in. “What happened?”
“He told me that the only way I could leave him was in a coffin. He slammed my head into a mirror and broke it, then punched me. I tried not to fall down because then I knew he would start kicking me. So, I stayed up. I think if I’d just fallen, he wouldn’t have—” She barely realized the tears that streaked down her face.
“Your honor,” Tyrone’s attorney interjected. “She ‘knew’ he would start kicking her? Did Miss Flynn have a crystal ball?”
“No!” Valerie nearly shouted. She cleared her throat and took a deep breath. “No. I didn’t need a crystal ball. I had past experience.”
The judge didn’t even look up. “I’ll allow it.”
The prosecuting attorney asked, “Why didn’t you just leave or resist when he started hitting you?”
Valerie looked back at the prosecuting attorney. “I’d learned not to fight back. To just take it. But when he started dragging me through the apartment, somehow, I knew what would happen, and I started fighting him.”
“Objection. ‘Somehow’ she knew? I didn’t realize we were in the presence of Madam Zohrah the tea-leaf reader, Your Honor. Would the witness like to offer any stock tips or perhaps some lottery number picks under oath?”
The judge sighed. “Redirect, counsel.”
The prosecuting attorney nodded and asked, “Miss Flynn, you said somehow you knew what would happen. Are you saying that because of the violence Tyrone had committed to that point and his verbal threat to put you in a coffin, you had an instinct that he intended to attempt to take your life?”
The defense attorney was on his feet. “Your Honor. Leading the witness.”
“You opened this can of worms and you’ll have your opportunity to cross. I’ll allow it. Take a seat.”
The prosecuting attorney made eye contact with the jury members again before resuming his questioning. “So, you knew he was going to try to take your life—to kill you. You tried to fight back. What happened next?”
Valerie looked her hands. “I wasn’t strong enough. He had me on the balcony, pushed against the railing. For a minute, my legs held me. I could barely breathe because he had both of his hands around my neck. He screamed in my face about how he would be the one to end our relationship, then he grabbed my legs and flipped me off the balcony.”
A woman in the jury box gasped. Valerie’s heart pounded until she could barely breathe. Finally, unable to avoid it any longer, she looked at Tyrone. He glared at her with such hatred in his eyes that she wanted to hold her hands up in front of her for protection and slink away. “How far did you fall, Miss Flynn?”
“Seventeen feet. I landed on a table on the porch below ours. I think it broke my fall enough that I survived.”
She could still hear the breaking glass from the tabletop. “Go on Miss Flynn,” the attorney prompted.
“I don’t remember a lot after that. My neighbors were outside. They heard the fight and saw me fall. I woke up once in the ambulance, and once in the hospital. Then I was out for a couple of days.”
“Can you tell us what was medically wrong with you?”
“Tyrone had broken my nose on the mirror and my left cheekbone when he punched me. I had hundreds of stitches from the glass table. My left elbow was broken. My left hip was broken. My lung had collapsed.”
