She had been right, of course, and the awful thing about Rosalind was that she never once said so, not when the verdict came down, not when she visited me inside, not in the car in the rain.

She did not need to say I told you so, because saying it would have been about her, and Rosalind was never about herself.

She simply showed up — kept my license alive, kept my contacts warm, wrote me those dry letters about case law that were, I understood only later, her way of keeping a hand extended into the dark where I was, so that when I was ready to climb out there would be something to grab.

She had believed me from the first day, not because she was sentimental, she was the least sentimental person I have ever known, but because she had read the case file and the numbers didn’t breathe right, and Rosalind trusted numbers over tears the way I had been trained to.