She said some things from the bench about the system and about failure. I’m told they were strong. I didn’t hear most of them, because at some point in the middle of it my ears filled up with a sound like water, and Noelle was gripping my forearm hard enough to leave marks, and I was looking down at the table thinking, very clearly and very stupidly, that I had left a library book in my cell and nobody was going to return it.
That’s what my mind did with the biggest moment of my life. It thought about a library book.
The processing took five more hours. Freedom has paperwork.
I walked out of the Mercer County Courthouse at 6:40 in the evening on September 18, 2026, into air that smelled like rain coming and cut grass, and there were maybe forty people on the steps and I did not know a single one of them.
