He had spent five years unable to explain the steadiness in Elena Cole’s eyes, and now, at the eleventh hour, someone had handed him the possibility of an explanation, and he found that he could not, in conscience, let a person be put to death while that possibility sat unopened on a table in his prison.

Whatever it cost him, he would rather pay it than spend the rest of his life wondering.

It is a rare and difficult thing, what Mitchell did, and it deserves to be named plainly, because the world does not produce many people willing to do it.

He was not Elena’s advocate.

He was not her lawyer or her friend or her family.

He was an official of the very system that had condemned her, an instrument of the machinery, a man whose entire professional life had been built on the assumption that the verdicts handed down to him were sound and his job was to carry them out.