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The prosecutor at Elliot's trial hammers on his documented habit of lying about everything, but the defense attorney brings out all of Elliot's charisma and manages to establish reasonable doubt. Portia is perfectly, tragically beautiful on the stand, and gets off with a light sentence. A year after she's released, she plays Roxie Hart in a revival of Chicago.
Drew's parents hire him the best lawyer they can afford, but as far as Dory can tell, it doesn't make a difference. His testimony is full of those stilted fragments he uses when the truth is unpleasant, but he doesn't want to say it. When Alan Yang testifies, everyone in the room knows Drew will go down hard.
Dory gets on the stand for all of them, even Drew. Especially Drew. She kind of can't believe what he did to try to get them to Shanghai, but, well, he loves her. People do awful things for love. She should know.
She takes responsibility for as much as she truthfully can. She tells the police about April even before the body washes ashore. The judge has no reason to show her mercy.
Her parents don't return any of her calls, so that's fun.
The first few times she goes to the prison library, she researches the laws related to Drew's case, looking for some loophole that can set him free. Then one of the other inmates (Keisha?) sees her reading and asks her for help writing a letter.
"I'm not much of a writer," Dory says. She still remembers her freshman composition professor's comment on a draft of one of her essays: You're meandering here, which indicates that you don't have a central argument. When you revise, think more about what you want to say. But she couldn't think of anything at all, and wound up with a C-minus.
On the other hand, no one's asked her for help with anything in a while. "But maybe I can talk through it with you."
The woman's name is Akeesha, so Dory was sort of close there, and she manages to help Akeesha organize her thoughts into the letter she needs to write. Other women start coming to her, and sometimes there are whole days when Dory doesn't read about Drew's case at all.
Sometimes, there are small hours of the morning when instead of remembering their last night together, Dory remembers how Drew talked about her on the stand: stilted fragments again. In all those fragments, he never actually said he would have taken her to Shanghai.
Did Drew mean anything he said on that last night? Was it just a coincidence that he discovered all that passion at the moment when he most needed her on his side?
Dory thinks about writing to him, but ends up writing other things instead: letters for her new friends, journal entries, and an essay about criminal justice reform. On the third draft of the article, Julian only underlines six of her sentences in red.
In her fourth year in prison, her essay appears in n+1. "I think I might write a book," she says at lunch. "Nelson Mandela published a book in prison, right?"
Akeesha presses a hand to her face. "Honey."
"Sorry," Dory says. "I got excited."
The article isn't published under her real name. She can't stand the thought of someone in Keith's or April's family seeing her byline and reliving everything that happened to them. Every awful thing she's done, she would take back if she could.
She doesn't deserve this moment of triumph, or any of the peace she sometimes finds on ordinary days. But she feels it all the same.
No one ever did tell her what she could do. She guesses she's glad she found it.