And he thought, though he would not have admitted this to any of his colleagues, that if there was even the smallest chance the state was about to do something that could never be undone to a person who did not deserve it, then the least he could do, the very least, was allow her to hold her child one last time.

After several long moments, he uncapped his pen, and he signed the authorization, and he spoke two words to the officer waiting in the doorway.

“Bring the child.” It was, by any measure, a small mercy, an ordinary act of decency inside a place that did not offer many opportunities for them, and Mitchell expected nothing to come of it beyond a mother’s tears and a child’s confusion and the unbearable ordinary grief of a goodbye.

He had signed a thousand documents in his career that mattered more, on paper.