I did not cry.
I had thought I might.
Instead I felt something quieter — a settling, like a door finally closing on a room that had been open too long.
Hale shook my hand outside the courtroom.
“Eleanor would be pleased,” he said.
“She’d say she told us so,” I said.
He smiled.
It was the first time I had seen him smile.
Douglas came out of the courtroom behind us.
His attorney was already on his phone, walking ahead.
Douglas stopped a few feet away.
He looked at me for a moment.
“She must have loved you very much,” he said.
His voice was different from the restaurant.
The composure was still there but the edge was gone.
What was underneath it was harder to name.
“She did,” I said.
“And I didn’t know it until it was too late to tell her.”
He nodded once.
Then he walked away down the corridor, and I watched him go, and I did not feel what I had expected to feel.
