Five attorneys was not a legal team; it was a performance of overwhelming force, the way a man doubles his voice when his argument is weak.

Four of them had the careful blankness of people billing by the hour on a matter they did not fully understand.

The fifth, the one with the wire-rimmed glasses, watched me the way I was watching him — and he was the only one in the room, other than me, who had noticed that my mother’s hands were not quite steady.

That was the thing they had all missed, in their certainty.