I saw only total, unmitigated defeat.

And it hurt more than I expected, because some small, buried, foolish part of me still grieved for a different woman, the one who had held my hand when I was sick as a child, who had made hot chocolate on snow days, who had braided my hair before school.

But that woman was a ghost.

The woman at the defense table was a stranger who had chosen money over her own daughter, and I let the ghost go, there in that courtroom, and grieved her, and turned to face the stranger with clear eyes.

That grief surprised me, its size and its persistence, because it was not grief for anything that had actually been taken from me in the alley.