The fortune Denton had hoarded was seized and turned into restitution for the Brannock and Jimenez families; Jaime Jimenez, freed and cleared, wept in a courtroom hallway with his grown children around him.

I went to see him, once, after the exonerations were final.

I don’t fully know why — guilt, maybe, that my family’s comfort had been built on his stolen decades, though I’d married into it knowing nothing.

He was gentle with me in a way I hadn’t earned.

He told me he had spent the first years of his imprisonment consumed by hatred and the last years learning to set it down, because the hatred was one more thing the men who framed him got to take from him, and he had decided to stop giving it.

“They took my thirties and my forties,” he said.