Chapter 89: Nothing
I was in the yard for nineteen minutes.
Theo came out at some point, stood six feet away, said nothing, and went back in.
I want to set down what I did with those nineteen minutes.
I did not cry. I did not sit down on the wet ground. I did not go through the six years.
I built a list of who I could tell.
That is what my head does. It is a defect and it is the only reason I am not dead.
The list had six names on it and I took all six off in nineteen minutes.
One. The District Attorney's Office.
I was a felon with a theory. The data was obtained privately, from a car I do not own, by a technician I paid, at the request of a woman with an obvious motive to lie.
Everything I had would be described in one sentence: the defendant hired an expert.
Two. My trial counsel.
Alan Kessler left the public defender's office four years ago. Even if he remembered me, he would be a man asked to say publicly that he let a woman plead to something she did not do.
Three. The police.
The trooper who wrote the report had been given a signed confession before he wrote a line. If you hand a person the answer, they do arithmetic that arrives at the answer. That is not corruption. It is worse, because it cannot be punished.
Four. A newspaper.
A story runs once. When it runs, everybody who matters gets a lawyer, and every document I have not got yet becomes a document I will never get.
Five. Dean.
If I go to Dean, Dean tells Bree within the hour, and Bree tells Renata within the hour after that, and then there are three people organising instead of two.
Six. Bree.
I stood in the rain and thought about walking into that house and putting my hand on her throat. I want that on the record too.
I did not do it. Not out of virtue. Because I had counted.
If I put a hand on her I go back inside for two years on the violation alone, and the module report becomes a document belonging to a woman who assaulted the person she was accusing.
Two years, against six.
So the list was empty, and I was standing in a scrapyard in the rain holding nothing.
That is the honest shape of it. On the day I found out I was innocent, my situation got worse.
Before, I was a woman serving out a sentence she had accepted.
Now I was a woman who knew. Knowing is a thing you carry without setting it down, because everywhere you could set it down is a place where it breaks.
I went back inside at 3:40.
Sirko had made instant coffee in three mismatched cups.
She slid the folder across.
“That's your copy,” she said. “Signed and dated. My original stays in my safe, with my field notes and the module, in the bag with three signatures on it.”
“How long will you keep it?”
“Until somebody with authority asks me for it, or until I die,” she said. “I've written it into my business continuity file. That's the only reason any of this survives me.”
“What do I owe you for the photograph work?”
“Nothing.”
“Ms. Sirko.”
“You paid four hundred and seventy-five dollars for a download,” she said. “The scaling took forty minutes. Don't argue. I'm not being kind, I'm protecting my own report.”
I did not argue.
Theo had not spoken since I came in.
Sirko looked at him, then at me, and said the most useful sentence anybody said to me that year.
“You two are now the only people alive who know this,” she said. “That is a chemically unstable arrangement. Get a lawyer, or get very disciplined, and I'd do both.”
We drove back in the rain.
At mile thirty, Theo said, “Say her name.”
I said, “No.”
“Why not.”
“Because the second I say it out loud in a car, it's a story I'm telling,” I said. “And right now it's a measurement.”
He drove for another two miles.
Then he said, “You know what I keep thinking about?”
“No.”
“That my mother braked,” he said. “No. That the car braked. One and a half seconds. Whoever it was saw her and tried.”
I looked out the window.
“That was supposed to make me feel better,” he said. “It doesn't.”
He pulled into the lot behind the halfway house at 6:41, nineteen minutes before curfew.
He put the car in park and did not turn it off.
“Cass,” he said. “I've been writing letters to you since I was sixteen.”
“I know.”
“So on Saturday you're going to tell me her name,” he said. “And then you and me are going to have the first real fight we've ever had. I'm going to lose it, and I'm still going to have it.”