With the prosecution nearly finished presenting its witnesses and the defense expected to be brief, the end of Bill Cosby’s criminal rape trial is quickly approaching. Time has felt confounding and elastic during these proceedings: the case revolves around an event that occurred thirteen years ago, which was reopened in part because of a recent eruption of allegations that span four decades. This week, phone logs and date-stamped statements have been on endless loop. And now, suddenly, the verdict looms. Andrea Constand has, in essence, become a proxy for the nearly sixty women who have accused Cosby of sexual assault; the verdict, which will likely be reached before next Friday, stands in for a kind of collective justice that may always be out of reach.

Things have been bleak at the courthouse, as you might expect. Cosby, whose lawyers have said that he will not testify but whose spokesman, on Friday, wouldn't rule it out, is a silent, somewhat gothic figure, sitting at the front of the room, evincing no reaction. He is nearly eighty, and in a recent interview he said that he is now completely blind. On Thursday, the prosecuting attorney Kevin Steele read portions of Cosby’s 2005 deposition concerning Constand’s charges into the record, and they included statements from the once lively comedian that feel, frighteningly, both alien and mundane: “I don’t hear her say anything, and I don’t feel her say anything. And so I continue and I go into the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection.”

In the midst of this, two witnesses for the prosecution have briefly electrified the courtroom. In different ways, Gianna Constand and the police sergeant Richard Schaffer have both sparred with Cosby’s attorneys, and brought their full selves to bear in Andrea’s defense.

Gianna Constand, Andrea’s mother, was sworn in on Wednesday. She is a former medical secretary who now works part-time at a gas station and lives in a rural area north of Toronto. She wore a dark blazer and a lime-green polo shirt; her brown hair was pulled back with a barrette. She made me think of a hardy, wilted sunflower, and she sat with her hands clasped in front of her, like a kid in school.

When Andrea told her about Cosby, Gianna said, she was driving to the office. Andrea “said a bad word,” and told her that Cosby had drugged and raped her. Gianna started shaking behind the wheel, she said. “Mom is on the highway,” she told her daughter. “I need to get off the highway. . . . Wait till Mommy gets in the office, and I’ll call you from there.”

For the most part, Gianna is unassuming, and movingly so. But, in the way she recounted the incident—“Mommy,” in the third person, as if she were speaking to a child—it became clear how fiercely protective it made her. Early on in her testimony, she related an anecdote about rushing to the mall to purchase a sweatshirt for Cosby from the Canadian chain Roots, as a thank-you for the complimentary tickets he had given the Constand family. Gianna put the sweatshirt in a gift bag and gave it to a security guard at Cosby’s comedy show, asking him to make sure that Mr. Cosby got the gift. In the context of this trial, the pathos in this anecdote choked me up.

Later, at home, when Andrea told her more about what had happened, Gianna immediately asked for Cosby’s phone number. “Mom, it’s better that you don’t,” Gianna recalled her daughter saying. She sounded scared, Gianna said. “I was scared, too,” she added. “But I think the motherly instinct kicked into me.” She told Andrea, “If you don’t give me his phone number, I’m going to take the next flight out and I’m going to go and talk to him.”

Andrea gave her the phone number, and Cosby picked up when Gianna called. She was angry, she said. She demanded to know what medication he had given her daughter, and why he didn’t call 911 when Andrea got sick. Cosby said that he couldn’t read the letters on the prescription bottle, and asked her to put Andrea on the line. Andrea picked up an extension. Cosby then said, according to Gianna’s recollection, “Well, Andrea, let’s tell your mother what happened.” Andrea stayed silent, and so he began “telling me everything that he physically did to her,” Gianna said. He called Gianna “Mom” throughout the conversation. She remembered him saying, “Mom, there was no penile penetration, just digital penetration,” and “Mom, she even had an orgasm.”

“He was talking about it,” Gianna said, her voice getting sharper, “almost like he was repeating what he did to my daughter to try to get me to believe that it was consensual. . . . In other words, manipulating it!” Andrea had not, at this point, told her the details of the assault—she had been too embarrassed to provide specifics. “So I learned it more from the defendant than I did from her,” Gianna said.

According to phone records, the call went on for two hours. Andrea, unable to speak, got off the line. Gianna remembers yelling at Cosby. “Why would you drug her? Why would you have her sleep there? What if she had died?” She told the jury, “He drugged her, and then he put her on the chesterfield”—meaning the couch—“and then he did whatever he wanted. He knew she was unconscious.”

At that point in her testimony, the defense objected, citing hearsay. Gianna’s face changed. She looked shocked, and fierce. She blinked quickly. She would have fought off rabid dogs for her daughter, it seemed; she would have done anything to shoulder more of this burden. She was appalled at the defense’s cross-examination, the insinuations about Andrea. “I find that you are testing my memory on irrelevant things,” she said.

On Thursday, Sergeant Richard Schaffer, from the Cheltenham Township Police Department, in Pennsylvania, presented a defense of Andrea Constand in a different, funnier, subtler key. Schaffer, in 2005, was part of the team that investigated Constand’s allegations against Cosby, and he testified, wearing a dark suit and red tie, in the clear, clipped rhythm of a police officer going over a case he knows well. In 2005, Cosby related to police the bizarre anecdote of a prior sexual advance that Constand had rebuffed—a story about lifting up her shirt and bra, and kissing her breasts. (Constand denies that this excruciatingly odd-sounding event happened.) Cosby told police that when Constand rejected the gesture he backed off.

In his cross-examination of Schaffer, the defense attorney Brian McMonagle read from that old interview, and asked if the transcript accurately reflected Cosby’s remarks. “He was a gentleman there, sir,” Schaffer said. McMonagle kept reading, then asked Schaffer again if the account was correct. “Again, he was a real gentleman there,” Schaffer said. McMonagle pointed out that Cosby hadn’t called himself a gentleman. “No,” Schaffer said. “That was me, sir.” McMonagle read out another part of the interview a few minutes later. “That’s what it said, right?” he asked. Schaffer, dry as can be: “You read it perfectly, sir.”

Later, the prosecution questioned Schaffer again. The attorney Stewart Ryan asked about Cosby’s account of having a “consensual sexual encounter” with Constand. “That’s his version, sir,” Schaffer answered. Cosby had wanted it to go further, Ryan said. “Seems like it to me, sir,” Schaffer said.

At the end of his testimony, during the second cross-examination, Schaffer openly bridled against the wording of McMonagle’s questions. Constand took the pills, McMonagle said. “After his prompting, yes,” Schaffer said. “She voluntarily put them in her mouth,” McMonagle said. “Again,” Schaffer said, “if you’re going to characterize it as voluntary—what was told to her to get her to take those pills?”

“She was thirty-one years old, and she put them in her mouth,” McMonagle said.

“Under the guise that she was taking herbal pills,” Schaffer said. “In her mind, if she’s taking the pills, she believes they’re herbal.”

The lawyers and reporters in the back of the room traded somewhat shocked glances. So much of this trial has been dour and unsurprising. Gianna Constand and Richard Schaffer offered something like a moral thrill.