How to remain calm while someone told an elaborate lie directly to my face.
But nothing in my training had prepared me to watch my own father use those skills against me.
Judge Rebecca Sloan looked down from the bench.
“Ms. Mercer, do you deny accessing the account in question?”
“No, Your Honor.”
My father smiled.
“I deny that the money belonged to him,” I continued.
His smile disappeared.
Attorney Edwin Pike straightened his jacket.
“Then you acknowledge taking approximately forty thousand dollars?”
“I acknowledge transferring funds from an account established for my benefit into another account under my name.”
“Without your father’s permission?”
“I didn’t require his permission.”
My father released a theatrical laugh.
“Listen to her. Five years pouring drinks at hotel banquets, and now she talks like a lawyer.”
A few people in the gallery shifted uncomfortably.
The reporters scribbled.
I kept my eyes on Judge Sloan.
I knew exactly which photographs my father had given them.
One showed me carrying a silver tray at a hotel banquet.
Another showed me standing outside the service entrance in a black vest, my hair pulled into a simple bun.
They were genuine photographs.
That was what made them useful to him.
During an advanced language-training assignment, I had worked occasional banquet shifts under an authorized civilian cover.
My father had taken those images, removed every piece of context surrounding them, and constructed an entirely different version of my life.
In his version, I was a failed daughter who had never accomplished anything.
A woman who occasionally disappeared because she was unstable.
A woman who purchased military uniforms online because she desperately wanted to be respected.
And now, according to him, a thief.
Pike placed an enlarged photograph on an easel.
“Your Honor, this is the respondent working as a banquet server.”
He changed the photograph.
