He told Sarah the decision was temporary. She understood the word temporary, but she also saw the envelope containing his scholarship paperwork left untouched beside his bed. "You worked for that school," she told him. "Don't let them take it from you, too." He answered that he had not stopped being a student; he had only changed what he needed to learn first.
The public library became his second home. He worked at a broad oak table near a radiator that hissed through the night, and when closing time came, he continued reading digitized cases on an old laptop until a security guard told him to leave. In the basement document room, librarians showed him how to find archived ordinances, county budgets, and old versions of statutes. He learned quickly that the law was not a single book that could be memorized but a complicated set of rules governing how facts entered a courtroom, who could speak, and what was permitted to happen before a jury ever heard anything.
At first he read the wrong things. He spent an entire afternoon on federal civil procedure before realizing that his mother's criminal trial was proceeding under Illinois law and that he needed to separate the criminal prosecution from the related property proceeding. He filled pages with notes about authentication, discovery obligations, court orders, deadlines, and the difference between proving that a document existed and proving what its contents meant. More than once, a librarian found him with his head on the desk and a legal dictionary open under his elbow.
The senior reference librarian, Lila Monroe, did not ask him to go home. She brought him a small rolling cart for the books and helped him distinguish binding authority from articles that only summarized it. She was sixty-one, with silver hair pulled into a braid and a habit of correcting anyone who described legal research as searching for quotations that sounded convincing. "If you want to use a rule," she told him, "find out what problem that rule was written to solve. Then find out the exceptions."
Elijah returned the following morning with three pages of questions. Lila listened to him explain the alleged transfers and asked whether the access records actually identified a person or merely a set of credentials. He blinked at the simplicity of the distinction. The prosecution had been treating the two as interchangeable, and he had been so busy chasing statutes that he had not forced himself to separate them.
That afternoon he drew a diagram. One box represented his mother's employee account, another the computer used for the transfers, another the person controlling that computer, and another the destination bank accounts. The state's presentation drew a straight line from the first box to the last. Elijah began writing a question mark beside every arrow.