The elevator doors opened. Audrey looked at the woman who had guided her when she was a young clerk and now could do very little to help without entering the same conflict Audrey had been trying to avoid. "That's what I'm learning," she said. "How much an ordinary person loses while the system prepares to act."
Friday night, October thirtieth, found Audrey alone at her dining table. Across the harbor, a tugboat moved slowly beneath orange lights. Her binder lay open in front of her, and the clock above the kitchen doorway seemed louder than usual. She counted the available evidence aloud as if speaking at Greater Hope's first-Sunday table.
"Receipt. Card statement. Breath log. Sixty-one reports. Two refusals from the video company. No independent judge yet."
She opened her laptop and began an email addressed to contacts in the federal marshals service. The first sentence identified her as a sitting federal judge and requested immediate assistance preserving the store video. She knew the people on the other end. Most would answer quickly, and several would make whatever calls were necessary before sunrise. The request might save evidence that could be decisive.
She read the words again. It was not inherently wrong for a judge to report potential wrongdoing, seek protection, or ask federal authorities to preserve evidence. Nor was it wrong for an ordinary litigant to contact appropriate investigators. But this particular email did not ask through the process she and Harvey had begun; it led with a title she knew could move the request ahead of hundreds of people whose names had never appeared on a judicial roster.
She imagined Drummond holding the email on the courthouse steps. He would say she had used her office to obtain evidence unavailable to everyone else. He would ignore the fact that the company had refused even a simple request to preserve footage, but Audrey knew an unfair opponent could still raise a real question. She wanted a record that survived because it was authentic and properly obtained, not one whose central moment could be overshadowed by an avoidable dispute about her status.
She called Harvey. He answered before the second ring, his voice rough with sleep.
"I'm looking at an email," Audrey said. "I haven't sent it."
"Read it to me."
She read the first line. Harvey asked whether it was true. She said every word was true. He asked why she had called him instead of pressing send, and she found herself unable to answer without returning to the roadside where a deputy had laughed at her name.
"Because you didn't have this button in 2019," she said. "The brothers didn't have it. The nurse didn't have it. If I use it now, maybe I win my part. Maybe the county tells everyone else they're not a federal judge, so their papers have to wait."
"And if you don't send it, that tape may disappear."