I Can Defend Him
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 5
The story broke at 11:47 pm.
Nora Kane filed it from her car in the parking garage of Forbes Industries with her laptop open on the passenger seat and her hands shaking slightly and the specific feeling of someone who has just handed a lit match to a story that was always going to burn everything in its path once it had oxygen.
By midnight it had oxygen.
By 12:30 am it was everywhere.
In Ten Pines, on Riordan Street, Mildred Foster’s phone started ringing at 12:44 am.
She didn’t answer it.
She’d learned something in her seventy one years about phones that rang in the middle of the night. They were either bad news or people who wanted something. The first kind she’d had enough of. The second kind could wait until morning.
She turned it face down on the nightstand and went back to sleep.
It rang eleven more times before dawn.
Patrick saw it first.
He was up at six the way he was always up at six for school and he had his phone in his hand before his feet hit the floor out of the habit of seventeen year old boys everywhere and he saw the notification and sat very still on the edge of his bed for a moment.
Then he read the headline.
TECH CEO’S PARTNER ARRESTED IN MURDER CONSPIRACY. EIGHT YEAR OLD GIRL CREDITED WITH CRACKING BILLION DOLLAR FRAME JOB.
He read it twice.
Then he got up and went to Camika’s room and opened the door.
She was already awake. Sitting up in bed with her notebook open on her knees and her pen moving across the page in those small neat letters. She looked up when he came in with the specific expression of someone who has been expecting this interruption and has decided to be patient about it.
“You saw,” he said.
“I saw,” she said.
“Camika.” He held up his phone. Her name was in the third paragraph. Her school. Her neighborhood. Ten Pines. “They know who you are.”
“They knew who I was when I stood up in that courtroom,” she said. “That was always going to happen.”
“There are going to be reporters,” he said.
“I know.”
“At the school. At the house. Everywhere.”
“I know, Patrick.”
He looked at his sister sitting in her bed with her notebook and her pen and her complete unruffled certainty and felt the familiar combination of awe and exasperation that she had been producing in him since she learned to talk.
“What do we do?” he said.
Camika closed her notebook.
“Wake up Grandma,” she said. “And put the coffee on. We’re going to need it.”
Mildred Foster sat at the kitchen table at six thirty in the morning with her coffee in both hands and looked at Patrick’s phone screen for a long time.
Then she looked at Camika sitting across from her eating cereal like it was any other Tuesday morning.
“Baby girl,” she said.
“I’m fine Grandma,” Camika said.
“There are going to be people outside that door.”
“Probably already are,” Camika said. She nodded toward the window. “Don’t open the curtains yet.”
Mildred looked at the window. Then back at her granddaughter. Then at Patrick standing in the kitchen doorway with his phone and his seventeen year old uncertainty about what the correct response to this situation was.
She had raised these two children on a fixed income in Ten Pines with the specific combination of love and practicality that the situation had always required. She had watched Camika walk into a courtroom with a duct tape backpack and change the direction of a murder trial. She had brought covered dishes to Sandra Chen’s house and told Malcom Forbes to make sure justice was served.
She was not going to fall apart over reporters on her doorstep.
She set down her coffee cup.
“Patrick,” she said. “Get dressed for school. You’re going out the back.”
“Grandma—”
“You have a scholarship to protect,” she said. “You go to school. You say nothing to nobody. You hear me?”
Patrick looked at Camika.
Camika nodded once.
He went to get dressed.
Mildred looked at her granddaughter across the kitchen table. At this child. This eight year old child who had looked at a billion dollar conspiracy and decided it needed dismantling and had proceeded to dismantle it with a notebook and a pen and the kind of mind that came along once in a generation if you were lucky.
“What about you?” Mildred said. “School?”