Because Jim had come forward and cooperated fully, and because the evidence plainly showed that he had been recruited while vulnerable and then held in place by threats, his lawyers were able to negotiate an agreement that kept him out of prison.

He would be on probation for three years.

He would do community service, and a long course of financial counseling, and he would carry the fact of what he’d done for the rest of his life, which is its own kind of sentence and not a light one.

But he would not spend his best years in a cell for a crime another man had designed to land on him, and that mattered more to me than any number in Julian’s sentence.

People wanted me, I think, to be focused on Julian’s twelve years, to find in that number some satisfaction or closure.