Nia asked to speak with her. “You shouldn't have been put through this because of me.”
“I was hired to examine records,” Meera replied. “If the records support your account, that's what I'll say. If they don't, I'll say that too. The work is not a favor to you.”
That answer stayed with Nia. For years she had believed independence was best demonstrated through distance, through a judge's refusal to become personally invested in a case. Now she understood another dimension of it: people who did honest work without allowing fear, sympathy, or reputation to change the findings. Meera was not defending Nia's pride. She was defending the right to examine evidence without being punished for discovering something inconvenient.
By noon Alyssa had received an ethics complaint alleging that she had pressured witnesses and interfered with police personnel. The allegations were vague, referring to improper contacts and threatening statements without identifying a single coercive act. She recognized some of the language from old disciplinary filings used to intimidate defense lawyers in politically sensitive cases. She did not panic. She submitted a response, documented her witness contacts, and called Harold Kimell, a senior defense attorney with a reputation for resisting exactly this kind of pressure.
Harold arrived carrying one briefcase and no illusions. He had spent thirty years litigating against law-enforcement misconduct and was old enough to remember when police records existed only in handwritten files that could be misplaced between one morning and the next. He read the complaint, asked two factual questions, and set it aside. “They're trying to make your representation expensive,” he told Alyssa. “They're also trying to convince your client that everyone who helps her will suffer.”
“It's working,” Nia admitted.
Harold looked at her. “Fear isn't proof that their strategy is working. Fear is the response they're trying to create. What matters is whether it changes your choices.”
His steadiness reminded Nia of her father, though Harold was less gentle and wore a far more expensive watch. He agreed to join the defense team, both to protect continuity of representation and to provide another independent voice. He advised them to limit direct contact with witnesses and to have investigators handle future interviews. Everything should be documented in a way another lawyer could review without relying on anyone's recollection. In a case where allegations of pressure were being manufactured, transparency was a protection rather than an inconvenience.
Outside the office, the campaign against Nia became uglier. The hateful scratch on her car had been photographed and circulated online by someone mocking her reaction. Protesters began arriving at the courthouse with signs that quoted carefully selected lines from Halverson's report. A late-night caller left a message saying she had no right to sit in judgment of decent people.
Her neighbors started receiving inquiries from reporters about whether she had ever acted suspiciously at home. Mrs. Bell told one journalist that Nia had brought her groceries during a winter storm and closed the door in his face when he asked whether that was a calculated public-relations gesture.