She had tried to make my death a private lie.

The law made her crime a public fact.

There was a deep restoration in that for me, deeper than the sentence itself.

For two years I had been gaslit by my own failing body, told by a decade of tenderness that I was simply, mysteriously sick — made to doubt my own reality.

The trial gave me my reality back, stamped and certified and entered into the permanent record: I had not been crazy, I had not been weak, I had not failed at being well.

I had been poisoned, by that woman, for that reason, and now everyone knew it, and it was written down where it could never be erased.