I have wondered, since, what Marion saw in that moment, because her face in the courtroom was the one image from that day that has stayed with me most, more than Roman’s or Bianca’s.

For years, Marion had been my most relentless critic, the architect of a hundred small humiliations, a woman who had made it her project to remind me daily that I did not belong.

And I had always assumed her cruelty came from loyalty to her son, from a mother’s fierce partisanship, from loving Roman so much that she could not bear to see him bound to someone she deemed unworthy.

But her face in that courtroom told a different story.