The Deposition

The deposition was held in a conference room in Hartford with a view of a parking structure, and it began at nine in the morning, and Nadia Okafor had spent two full days preparing Rosa for it.

“They will be polite,” she had said. “That’s the part people aren’t ready for. Karen Pruitt is not going to shout at you. She’s going to be kind, and she’s going to be interested, and she is going to ask you two hundred questions you can answer easily so that when she asks the one you can’t, the rhythm carries you into answering it anyway.”

“What do I do.”

“Answer the question that was asked. Not the one you think is coming. If you don’t know, say you don’t know. If you don’t remember, say you don’t remember — those are different and don’t let her merge them.” Nadia had put down her pen. “And Rosa. If I say the word objection, you stop talking mid-word. Mid-syllable. I don’t care how rude it feels.”

It went, for six hours, exactly as Nadia had predicted.

Karen Pruitt was courteous. She established the dates, the duties, the wages — thirty-one thousand a year plus room and board, unchanged since 2016, which Rosa confirmed without complaint and which caused Karen to pause for a fraction of a second longer than the question warranted. She established the medications, the appointments, the fall in February 2023, which Rosa described flatly and completely and which produced, at the far end of the table, a small sound from Diane Vance that everybody pretended not to hear.

She established that Rosa had never been in Ellis Grange’s office. That she had waited in the car. That the book, in March of that year, had been a paperback of Rebecca, which she had read three times because it lived in the glove compartment.

Karen wrote that down.

At ten past three, having covered twenty-six years in six hours, she turned a page and said, in exactly the same friendly register she had been using since nine:

“Ms. Delgado, I want to ask you about your mother.”

Nadia’s pen stopped moving.

“Yes,” Rosa said.

“Her name was Teodora Delgado?”

“Yes.”

“When did she die?”

“The fourteenth of March this year.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“Where did she live?”

“Puebla. In Mexico.”

“For how long?”

“Since 1986,” Rosa said.

The room did not change. Nobody looked up. But Nadia Okafor, who had been writing continuously for six hours, wrote one word and underlined it.

“And before 1986?”

“She was here.”

“Here in the United States?”

“Yes.”

“Where, in the United States?”

A pause. Two seconds. Not more.

“In Connecticut.”

“Where in Connecticut, Ms. Delgado?”

“Objection to form,” Nadia said. “You can answer.”

Rosa put her hands flat on the table, the way she had in the kitchen with Diane, the way she had in Grange’s office.

“She worked at the house,” Rosa said. “At Harrow Lane. Before me.”

---

Afterward, everyone agreed that Karen Pruitt had handled the next ninety seconds extremely well, in the sense that she had done nothing at all.

She let it sit.

She did not lean forward. She did not glance at Margaret, who had gone the colour of the table. She turned a page she did not need to turn, and let eleven seconds of silence go into the transcript, where it would appear as nothing whatsoever, and then she said:

“For how long did your mother work at Harrow Lane?”

“From 1983. Until 1986.”

“Did Mrs. Vance know that you were Teodora Delgado’s daughter when she hired you?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I wrote to her and said so,” Rosa said. “That is all I said. My mother told me to write and say only that. And she wrote back and said the position was mine.”

“She’d never met you.”

“No.”

“She hired you sight unseen, in 1999, because you were Teodora Delgado’s daughter.”

“Objection,” Nadia said. “Form. Calls for speculation about Mrs. Vance’s reasoning.”

“I’ll rephrase. Ms. Delgado, did Mrs. Vance ever tell you why she hired you?”

“No.”

“Did you ever ask?”

“No.”

“In twenty-six years?”

“In twenty-six years.”

Karen let another silence run.

“Ms. Delgado,” she said, “why did your mother leave Harrow Lane in 1986?”

And Rosa said: “I don’t know.”

“You never asked her?”

“I asked her many times.”

“What did she say?”

“She did not say.”

“Ever?”

“Ever.”

“Ms. Delgado — “ and here Karen Pruitt’s voice did something very slight, dropped half a step, became almost gentle “ — your mother lived for thirty-nine more years. You were her daughter. You asked her many times. And she never once told you why she left a job in Connecticut in March of 1986?”

Nadia said, “Objection, asked and answered.”

“You can answer.”

“She never told me,” Rosa said.

“Did she tell you anything about that time at all?”

And Rosa Delgado, who had answered two hundred and forty questions in six hours without hesitating, stopped.

It was not dramatic. She did not weep or refuse. She simply sat, with her hands flat on the table, and did not speak, and the videographer’s camera kept running, and the court reporter waited with her fingers above the keys, and eleven seconds became twenty.

“Ms. Delgado?”

“She told me one thing,” Rosa said.

“What did she tell you?”

Nadia said, “Rosa.”

Rosa looked at her lawyer. Then she looked down the table at Margaret Vance-Halloran, whom she had known since Margaret was a young woman coming home at Christmas; at Peter, who was looking at his phone; at Diane, who was not.

“She told me,” Rosa said, “that Mrs. Vance was a good woman, and that I was not to think badly of her whatever anyone said. And she told me that in 1999, before I ever came here. And I did not understand it then, because nobody had said anything bad about Mrs. Vance to me. Nobody had said anything about her at all.”

Karen Pruitt did not move.

“My mother,” Rosa said, “was defending that woman to me before I had ever met her. Against something that had not been said yet.”

---

They took a break at half past three.

Nadia walked Rosa down the corridor to a window at the end and stood beside her, not touching her, looking at the parking structure.

“You were perfect,” she said.

“I was not perfect. I stopped.”

“Stopping is allowed. Stopping is honest.” Nadia let a moment pass. “Rosa, I need to ask you the thing I’ve been not asking you for five weeks.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what your mother was to Arthur Vance?”

Rosa looked at the glass.

“No,” she said. “I know she was twenty-six years old and she came here in 1983 and she went home in 1986 and she never married and she never once in thirty-nine years said his name. Not once, Miss Okafor. Not to say he was a bad man. Not to say he was a good one. My mother would say the name of the milkman before she would say that man’s name.”

Down the corridor, a door opened. Karen Pruitt came out with her coat over her arm and stopped, some distance away, when she saw them.

For a moment the three women stood in a hallway in Hartford — the lawyer who was paid to destroy the will, the lawyer who was paid to save it, and the woman it was about.

Then Karen Pruitt did something that Nadia Okafor would think about for a long time afterwards. She did not nod, or smile, or perform any of the small professional courtesies that get exchanged in corridors.

She said, across twenty feet of carpet, “Ms. Delgado, I’m going to suspend for today. We’ll finish another time.”

And Nadia said, sharply, “You have four hours left on the clock.”

“I know how much time I have,” Karen said.

She put her coat on and walked to the elevator, and Nadia watched her go with the distinct and unwelcome feeling of a lawyer who has just watched her opponent decline to pick up a loaded weapon, and has no idea why.