I did not say it in triumph.

I want that understood.

There was no satisfaction in those three words, no vindication that felt like winning.

I said them the way you close a door against weather — because it had to be done, because the alternative was letting the cold back in.

For ten years this woman had been, in my mind, my mother.

I had grieved my real mother and then been given a second one and loved her without reservation, and standing in that chapel I was not only sending a criminal to prison.