They laughed, then sat quietly with the empty coffee cups between them. Audrey told him she still thought about the night she nearly sent an email beginning with her judicial title. She wondered whether her refusal had been principled or whether she had simply been fortunate Sunil decided to help in time. She would never know what happened in the other possible version of the story.
"You don't need to pretend you did everything right," Harvey told her. "The important part is that when you made a choice, you were ready to explain it. That made room for somebody else to make his own choice, too."
"I keep hearing Mama say the law should count for everybody," Audrey replied. "It doesn't grow stronger because a judge reaches for it. It grows stronger when the person without a title can reach the same counter and ask the same question."
"Then you'd better count that twice," Harvey said.
On January second, the impound lot telephoned Audrey to say her silver sedan was ready. The caller added that someone had already cleaned the interior and polished the exterior, though the lot had not authorized the service. Audrey frowned and asked who had entered the secured property. The employee said the night supervisor had noticed a dark vehicle around two in the morning but could identify no visitor in the release records.
Audrey made a note of it. She did not regard a spotless car as proof that all its contents were safe. She asked for the access log and inspected the sedan before driving it away. The seats had been vacuumed, the dash wiped clean, and the windows polished until the car looked almost as it had when she left the courthouse parking lot that October morning.
She remembered the feeling of the tow truck raising it while she sat in handcuffs. The car itself had never been guilty of anything, yet for months it had been kept behind a fence as though possession could substitute for an answer. She drove north with both hands on the wheel and told herself that the next time a patrol car appeared behind her, she would still feel her pulse change. Survival did not require pretending the fear was gone.
The following Sunday, January third, the pews at Greater Hope filled long before the choir began. The scholarship committee had arranged the money for the ceremony, and Jasmine Rivers stood near the front in a navy dress, trying not to cry before anyone said her name. Willa's table had been set beside the pulpit, with the old ledger open where she used to write the month's total. A small framed photograph showed Willa smiling beneath her extravagant church hat.
Audrey wore the lemon-yellow blouse under a charcoal jacket and both gold earrings. She placed eighteen thousand six hundred dollars on the table, turned toward the congregation, and began counting. Her voice remained steady all the way through the stack. At the end she turned the bills over and counted again from the bottom, exactly as Willa had taught her.