"I could."
"Sentimental?"
"Evidence."
She raised an eyebrow.
"Of what?"
I thought about the question.
"That a thing can get hit hard and still do its job."
Carter nodded once, accepting the answer without turning it into a lesson.
Then she surprised me.
"I owe you an apology."
"For what?"
"The morning you arrived, I knew the review made some people nervous. I didn't believe anyone would try to interfere inside the courthouse. I relied too much on the building itself."
"You came out of the courtroom."
"After he already had your wrist."
"You didn't put him there."
"No. But institutions become dangerous when the people running them think the walls create safety automatically. A courthouse is just a building unless the people inside enforce the rules."
That sounded more like Evelyn Carter than any retirement speech could have.
I looked toward the marble corridor beyond the reception room.
For months, walking past the column where Vance grabbed me had tightened something in my chest. I had learned not to avoid it because avoidance made the hallway grow larger in my mind.
I walked through it often now.
Sometimes I noticed the column.
Sometimes I did not.
That felt like progress.
"You did enforce them," I said.
Carter sipped her coffee.
"So did you."
She nodded toward the briefcase.
"You said no."
That was all.
No heroic speech.
No applause.
Just the truth of the first choice that morning.
I had said no.
It had mattered because someone with authority had been willing to hear it.
Months later, I was retained for another audit in a different county.
Nothing as dramatic as Westbridge.
A procurement review involving court interpreters, billing codes, and contracts that might have been poorly managed rather than corrupt. The work involved invoices, scheduling software, and an argument over whether two vendors were related entities.
I loved it.
Boring meant the process was functioning before lives were damaged.
On the first morning of that assignment, I entered a courthouse carrying the same leather briefcase.
A deputy at the security desk pointed to it.
"Ma'am, that case needs to go through the scanner unless you have a sealed-material order."
For one second, my body remembered Vance before my mind remembered where I was.