"I need counsel," Olivia said. "And I need the inventory of everything taken from me."
The officer looked toward the hallway. "That's handled after processing."
"My watch is a family keepsake," she said. "Please make sure it's recorded separately."
He nodded with the distracted courtesy of someone moving through a long shift. Olivia watched him place her scratched wristwatch in a labeled property pouch and seal it with a numbered strip. It was an ordinary metal watch Thomas had given her after she passed the bar examination, its face polished smooth by years of wear. She felt a small ache at the sight of it disappearing into the plastic, but she had already decided not to draw attention to why its safe preservation mattered.
The booking officer cataloged her purse, keys, wallet, phone, and the papers recovered from the car. Olivia asked for the numbers on each receipt to be read aloud, then repeated them until she could hold them in memory. The staff were not uniformly cruel; a young woman at the medical desk quietly offered her a dry towel when she noticed how badly her clothes were soaked. Olivia thanked her and wondered how many small acts of decency had to exist inside a system before the system itself could be called decent.
No one answered her requests for an attorney that night with anything more useful than a promise. By midnight she was sitting on a molded plastic bench between a woman arrested after a fight outside a bar and a frightened college student charged with driving on a suspended license. Both kept looking at her because they recognized her from court. Olivia tried to give them privacy by studying a crack in the wall, but the woman eventually spoke.
"You're the lawyer, right? The one who helps people get out of here."
"I'm a lawyer," Olivia said. "Tonight I seem to be waiting like everybody else."
"They say you had drugs."
"They say a lot of things," Olivia replied. "That doesn't make them true."
She thought of how often she had sat beside clients while prosecutors described accusations as though they were finished facts. It was one thing to understand the danger intellectually and another to feel it settle around her while she waited for a cell door to open. In a single night, her familiar courtroom language had become the language other people used about her. She knew the rules, but knowing rules did not guarantee that anyone with authority intended to follow them.
At 6:17 the next morning, the Milfield Morning Herald posted her booking photograph beneath a headline about a public defender arrested on drug charges. The article quoted an anonymous police source describing a major narcotics discovery during a lawful traffic stop. It mentioned Olivia's previous complaints against the police department and suggested that her criticism might have been an attempt to divert attention from her own conduct. Before the newspaper updated the story to note that she denied wrongdoing, the earlier version had already traveled across social media.