“Then please note the claimed malfunction in your report,” she said. “Include the time at which it began.”
The younger officer's expression changed. He stopped joking. They took a few photographs, collected no physical evidence, and promised a follow-up Nia doubted would come. After they left, she sat on the stairs with the house lights burning. She listened to Alyssa speaking with the technician and felt ashamed of how relieved she was not to be alone.
She understood suddenly what harassment was designed to steal before it ever took a job or damaged a reputation. It stole ordinary habits. The ability to make tea without checking a window, to drive home without memorizing license plates, to look at a dark room and believe it contained only darkness. Her home was still standing, her books still on the shelves, and nothing about her life felt intact.
Alyssa found her and sat beside her on the stairs. For a while neither spoke. Then Nia said, “A student asked me yesterday whether judges get scared.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That courage means not letting fear make the decision.”
Alyssa rested her elbows on her knees. “You gave her good advice. Now let the rest of us help you follow it.”
The next morning brought a rock through the front window and a message from the courthouse saying that the first hearing on Nia's administrative status would proceed without her active participation.
The rock landed on the living-room rug among splinters of glass. Mrs. Bell had seen a man in a dark jacket run toward a waiting vehicle, but she had been too far away to recognize his face. Nia called for assistance and kept her neighbor on the line until officers arrived. The two responding policemen took nearly an hour and questioned whether the damage could have been caused by local teenagers.
Alyssa came through the front door while the older officer was explaining that the department had limited resources. She carried footage from Mrs. Bell's porch camera on a thumb drive and placed it in an evidence envelope. The recording clearly showed an adult man throwing the rock and getting into the passenger side of a dark car. It did not identify him. It did establish that nobody had accidentally kicked a stone through the window during a childish prank.
“Please include this in your report,” Alyssa said.
The older officer looked at the envelope as if it contained something inconvenient. “We'll consider whether it's relevant.”
“A man approached a judge's house, threw a rock through her window, and fled in a waiting car,” Alyssa answered. “Relevance is not the difficult question.”
When the officers left, Nia watched them cross the lawn without speaking. She had been required for years to weigh an officer's testimony against competing evidence. She had taken that obligation seriously even when her rulings angered police associations. She had believed, perhaps too comfortably, that being careful with individual cases was enough to resist institutional habits. Now she saw how exhausting it was to insist on the obvious when the person who held the notebook did not want to write it down.