Dana Rooker was standing at the bottom, by the handrail, in the same gray cardigan she had worn in the witness box.
Nobody had arranged this. She had just waited five hours.
I came down the steps and stopped two away from her, which put us at about the same height, and we looked at each other for a while.
I had planned a lot of speeches over twenty-three years. Thousands of them. Cruel ones, mostly, in the early years. Some of them I polished for months.
Every one of them was gone.
She said, “I’m not going to ask you to forgive me.”
I said, “Good.”
She flinched like I’d hit her. But she stayed. I’ll give her that. She stayed.
Then she said, “I was nineteen and I was a coward, and every year after that I was less nineteen and more of a coward, and that part is mine. The first part was his. The rest of it was mine.”
