Chapter Five: After the Gavel
The courthouse steps in November are nobody’s idea of a comfortable place, but Tommy sat on them anyway, his hands in the pocket of his hoodie, watching the street.
Diana came out first and sat beside him. She didn’t say anything. She was good at that — at being beside him without requiring the moment to be something.
After a few minutes, Rachel came out. She stopped at the top of the steps, uncertain, and Diana looked up at her, and something passed between the two women that Tommy didn’t fully understand and didn’t try to.
“There’s a sandwich place on the corner,” Diana said. “Tommy hasn’t eaten since seven this morning because he was too nervous and told me he wasn’t hungry, which was not true.”
“It was partially true,” Tommy said.
“Do you eat sandwiches?” Diana asked Rachel.
Rachel blinked. “Yes.”
“Okay.”
It was not a resolution. It was three people on courthouse steps deciding to go eat sandwiches, which is not the same thing as a resolution but is, in its modest and necessary way, a start.
They walked down the steps together — not holding hands, not in a line, just moving in roughly the same direction — and the city went on around them, indifferent and busy, the way cities are, and the winter light came down flat and pale between the buildings, and Tommy walked with his hands in his hoodie pocket and let himself be, for a few minutes, just a twelve-year-old going to get lunch.
He had said the thing he had been holding. It had not fixed everything. It had not resolved the past or made the future simple or turned a hard story into an easy one.
But he had said it. And they had heard him. And they were here.
Sometimes that is where you have to start.
