"There isn't."
"Then no. And yes. Both."
He sat beside me.
For months after the hallway confrontation, I had told everyone I was fine because my wrist healed quickly. The bruising faded. The joint stiffness disappeared. There was no serious physical injury.
But sometimes when a uniformed officer moved too quickly behind me in a courthouse, my body reacted before my mind did.
Sometimes I checked exits in rooms where I had never checked them before.
Once, in a grocery store, a security guard reached past me for a shopping cart and I nearly dropped a bottle because I thought someone was grabbing my wrist.
I hated those moments.
They felt like Vance had stolen something small but private from the way I moved through ordinary spaces.
Romero noticed before I admitted it.
He gave me the name of a trauma counselor used by investigators and witnesses.
I almost refused.
Then I remembered how many times I had criticized institutions for making people prove damage before receiving help.
It would have been hypocritical to apply a harsher rule to myself.
So I went.
The counselor did not turn me into a different person.
She taught me that competence and fear can occupy the same body without cancelling each other out.
That mattered more than I expected.
I had built a career around appearing unshaken because people trusted auditors who sounded certain. The courthouse incident forced me to learn that being affected did not make me unreliable.
It made me a witness who had been affected.
Facts remained facts.
My nervous system was allowed to have an opinion too.
Marcus Vale's trial began fourteen months after the indictments.
By then, the Westbridge Police Department had an interim chief, a court-appointed discovery monitor, and an external evidence audit underway. Vale had retired rather than return from administrative leave, but retirement did not end the case.
His defense strategy was disciplined.
He admitted the department had recordkeeping problems.
He admitted he used blunt management language.
He admitted telling Vance to recover what he believed was improperly copied material.
But he denied corrupt intent.
His attorneys argued that every disputed act had an administrative explanation and that prosecutors had taken the vocabulary of risk management and reinterpreted it as conspiracy after the fact.
That argument was not ridiculous.
Which made the trial stronger.
If the defense had been absurd, the result would have taught nothing.
The prosecution had to show where management ended and concealment began.
Naomi Ellis testified first among the major witnesses.
I had met her in person only twice before trial. She was shorter than I expected, with cropped gray hair and a habit of aligning objects on a table before answering difficult questions.
On the stand, she explained complaint classifications in language the jury could understand.
"If a citizen says an officer searched a home without consent, the intake category does not decide whether that allegation is true," she said. "It preserves what the person is alleging so someone can investigate it. If you reclassify it as customer dissatisfaction, you don't disprove the search allegation. You make sure the system never asks whether it happened."
Vale's lawyer attacked her motives.
He showed the jury her downgraded performance review.
He asked whether she resented Vale.
"Yes," Naomi said.
The answer visibly surprised him.