"The fact that you were bleeding is also in your favor," he said dryly, again not for the first time. Andy knew it wasn't a clear-cut case of self-defense. Kat had planned for one of them to die that night, and he'd tried to downplay that reality as much as possible in the courtroom. It wasn't the first premeditated murder he'd defended and likely wouldn't be the last, but it was perhaps the one he could understand the best. People would do just about anything when they were backed into a corner.
He sighed quietly, the master of arguing having no particular argument against that. He didn't think she was wrong. Kat resisted the traditional narrative in every way possible, but it might literally be the death of her. He'd done everything he could to soften that perception without completely gutting her spirit. A brow arched in silent censure, a surefire sign that whatever was about to come out of his mouth next would be judging her. "Really? Your idea of a happy ending is to become a cat lady?" He shook his head in mock disappointment, or perhaps real disappointment. Andy was not a cat person. He wasn't an animal person at all at this stage of his life. Given Jacob's tendencies, he was a little glad they'd never gotten him a dog growing up. But if that was the vision that got her through this, far be it from him to take it from her.
"You have a right to be." His expression softened, but only slightly. Raw truth didn't need softness to meet it. "Courtroom justice and public opinion only go so far, Kat. They don't decide the truth. You already know what that is. And I doubt you'll break under the weight of this verdict, even if it's not in our favor. You haven't yet." Most people would have curled up and died long before now after what she'd been through, but Kat wasn't only still standing, she was still fighting. He could see the cracks though, even if no one else could. Nobody could fight forever. For better or worse, they were nearing the end of the rope. They just didn't know yet whether she was going to hang from it.
He'd been expecting this, not the gratitude so much, but the goodbye speech, because that was really what it was. If she went back into lockup, she wanted everything said that needed to be said. Andy could understand where she was coming from, and he couldn't even argue against that kind of defeatist attitude because her attitude didn't matter anymore. Nothing they said was going to change what happened next. That part was over. There were a lot of things he wished he could have said to his wife, to his son, and never got the chance to, so he was quiet, letting her get it out. He wondered if there were going to be things he regretted not saying to Kat too.
"You know why I did." They'd discussed it at length before. It was partly that Andy enjoyed a challenge, but it was mostly that he'd been in a similar place before, his reputation in shreds, the people he called friends and colleagues suddenly avoiding his gaze, his life crumbling around him one piece at a time. It happened so fast, and there had been no one--not even Laurie, along for the ride--who'd offered him any kind of support. He'd been so alone, single-handedly trying to hold everyone else together, only for it all to collapse anyway. He never wanted to see another person go through that.
Something had happened in the middle though, and then it had become less about personal trauma and more about Kat herself. Andy very rarely liked his clients--most of them were terrible people and guilty to boot, but they still deserved a good lawyer--but he liked her. Under other circumstances, he could see them being friends, and under these, that relationship was a little deeper, a little more intense, the kind of bond that was only forged over trauma and didn't always survive things going back to normal.
He huffed quietly at the word difficult, a nonverbal agreement that it was the understatement of the century, but he held her gaze, as steady and unflinching as she'd accused him of being. "You are worth saving. And while I wish the circumstances were better, it's a privilege to know you. You didn't have to let me in. You could have sent me out on a rail at any time, but you didn't. We got here together. We'll finish it that way too." He gripped her hand across the table and squeezed gently, trying to pack as much reassurance as he could into the gesture.
Still, in typical Kat fashion, her next words made him want to rest his head on the table and groan. He didn't because he had too much dignity for that, but honestly, breaking parole in the middle of a deliberation was possibly the worst plan he'd ever heard. "There are a hundred truck stops that don't violate your parole. Given how hard I've worked to keep you out of prison, can't you eat crappy pie at one of those?"
