For two decades I told myself I was done hoping. Then in March a lawyer from a place called the Second Look Project drove four hours to see me, and she sat down across that scratched metal table and said somebody had come forward.
I asked who.
She wouldn’t tell me.
So I sat in that courtroom in September with my hands folded on the table, wearing a suit a stranger bought for me, and I watched the door at the back of the room.
It opened.
And the woman who walked through it was the same woman who stood in that witness box in 2003 and pointed her finger at me and told twelve people she was certain, absolutely certain, that I was the man she saw running from the lot that night.
She was nineteen then. She had a ponytail and a cross around her neck and she cried while she said it.
