She was watching vindication and catastrophe arrive in the same instant, the confirmation that she had been right to believe, and the unbearable knowledge of how very close that belief had come to making no difference at all.

It is a peculiar torment reserved for those who fight for the wrongly accused and lose, and then, years later, are proven to have been right.

There is no clean triumph in it.

The vindication and the horror are the same fact viewed from two sides.

Yes, you were right; and being right, it turns out, was not enough, was never enough, would not have been enough if not for a chance so slim it barely qualifies as chance at all.

Sarah Jenkins would spend a long time afterward turning that over, the razor-thin margin of it, the way everything had depended on a hidden camera the killer missed and a teddy bear he forgot and a child brave enough to act and a warden willing to risk his career.