It mattered.

But a pardon does not give you back the years.

It cannot un-live the four years and eight months I spent inside those walls, or the twelve months my son spent in foster care believing his mother had abandoned him, or the first steps and first words of his I did not see, or the birthday I spent alone in a cell while a stranger, somewhere, put him to bed.

The state signed a paper saying that, legally, none of it had happened.

But it happened.

It is in my body, and in the particular way my son still sometimes checks, quickly, that I am still in the room.