Summer before trial

The summer before Jacob Barber’s trial is both a suspended season and a measure of the Barber family’s unaddressed strain. As Andrew Barber looks back, he sees that his effort to get his family through the case by sheer endurance made Jacob’s defense seem more urgent than Laurie’s distress, while the trial itself would turn uncertainty into competing narratives of motive and guilt.

A season made unbearable

In the last week of August, the heat was so persistent that people stayed indoors and the usually active sidewalks and shops grew quiet. Andrew did not understand the weather as the cause of his distress, but as its visible symptom: the world had already become increasingly difficult to bear. He remembers himself, Laurie, and Jacob as all “heat-crazy,” their private pressures gathering beneath the oppressive summer.

Andrew also recognizes how self-absorbed he had become. Although no one had explicitly accused him of wrongdoing, he had mentally entangled his own guilt with Jacob’s and felt himself coming apart. He told himself to hold together, keep up appearances, and avoid cracking. His effort to maintain a composed exterior became a strategy for surviving the trial, but it also narrowed his attention to what he believed had to be done next.

The imagined shore of After

Andrew did not speak openly with Laurie about his feelings or invite her to express hers. He assumed the family should stay strong, protect Jacob through the trial, and repair its emotional damage later. In his imagination, After was a place the family could reach once the case was over, where there would finally be time for problems he had treated as secondary. Looking back, he understands that this promise of later healing was a mistake: the damage was unfolding while he was refusing to attend to it.

The change in Laurie had been visible. She had lost weight, her hip bones protruded, her hair had grown grayer and less carefully kept, and she spoke less when they were together. Andrew knew that she had once loved him when he came to her damaged, yet he did not offer comparable care when she was in distress. He remained fixed on saving Jacob first, rationalizing his emotional hardness as the product of accumulated stress and his habit of internalizing dangerous feelings. His retrospective judgment is harsher: he admits that the explanations were true but also excuses, and calls himself a fool for failing to see Laurie’s suffering.

A brief return to ordinary life

Just before Labor Day, with the town largely emptied for the holiday, the three Barbers went to Whole Foods despite Andrew’s concern about being seen in public. He had wanted the family to appear visibly shattered, wary that a juror might remember them shopping in an expensive market and take that as a sign they were treating the case lightly. Hunger, fatigue with constant caution, and the shortness of time overcame that concern.

Inside the store, familiar roles briefly returned: Laurie planned the meals, Andrew picked up items on impulse, and Jacob wanted food before they reached the register. At the cheese counter, Jacob joked about the strong Gruyère and the possible consequences of eating too much. All three laughed, not because the joke was extraordinary, but because Jacob had made one. After a summer in which he had grown unusually silent and difficult for his parents to read, the glimpse of their son as an ordinary, joking boy offered a momentary reprieve from the public image of him as a monster. The family was still smiling as they reached the checkout area, with Laurie at the cart, Andrew beside her, and Jacob behind them.

The trial turns toward a story

The summer’s pressure gives way to the trial’s struggle over how the killing should be understood. In his opening account to the jury, Neal Logiudice describes Benjamin Rifkin as a fourteen-year-old found dead in Cold Spring Park after being stabbed and left near the school and home he had been walking between. Logiudice stresses the abruptness of the decision to kill, then presents Jacob as a privileged boy with a lethal temper who had finally snapped after being teased.

The strategy is not simply to list evidence but to supply a story that jurors can carry into deliberations. Logiudice acknowledges that Benjamin had teased Jacob and that Benjamin was an imperfect, ordinary teenager, while insisting that such teasing was not exceptional. He contrasts Benjamin as handsome, popular, and socially secure with Jacob as quiet, lonely, and an outsider among classmates. In this account, the contrast helps make resentment and a sudden loss of control legible, even before the evidence has resolved what happened.

Yet the proposed story contains a gap. Logiudice says Jacob left home on the morning of April 12, 2007, with a knife and an idea, and asks what turned a fantasy of murder into an actual killing. Andrew observes that the prosecutor has no definite answer, only theories and probabilities, including speculation about a so-called murder gene. Logiudice suggests that Benjamin probably insulted, pushed, threatened, or bullied Jacob, but Andrew’s skeptical response exposes the uncertainty beneath the confident courtroom theme. The summer before trial is therefore not merely a wait for a verdict: it is the period in which the family’s private strain and the prosecution’s public story both take shape, while the central question of motive remains unsettled.