But it is not true to anything I actually felt, and I would be lying if I pretended otherwise.

What I felt, watching the sentences read out, was not triumph.

It was something graver and heavier and much harder to name — the feeling of a terrible thing being set, at last, into its correct place, which is not the same as the terrible thing being undone, because nothing could undo it.

A child was still dead.

Camellia would spend fifteen years in a cell and would come out having missed her own life and lost her own son, and no part of that was a victory for anyone; it was only what the law required, correctly, and requiring it did not make it a happy thing.

Luke would lose eight years and everything he had built, and I felt, watching him, none of the vindication I had once imagined I would — only a vast, cold, final sadness for the years I had given a man who turned out to be capable of what he was capable of.