Over the years he had learned to read the faces of the people the state had condemned, and there was a look those faces almost always wore in the end, some mixture of fear and resignation, the look of a person who knows, at bottom, what they have done and what is coming.

Elena’s face did not wear that look.

It never had.

What lived in Elena’s eyes was something Mitchell had seen only rarely in his career, and had learned, uneasily, to take seriously: not the fear of a person facing punishment, but the specific, unyielding steadiness of a person facing an injustice.

He had told himself, many times, that he was imagining it.

He had never quite managed to believe himself.