Eighteen months of juvenile court is not eighteen months of hearings.

It is eighteen months of a waiting room.

I want to describe it, because every account of a case like this cuts from the hospital to the verdict, and the thing in between is where the actual damage is done, and nobody writes it down.

The Juvenile Center on Hamilton Avenue is a large building and the waiting area outside the courtrooms has rows of connected plastic chairs and a vending machine and a television mounted high in one corner that is always on and always muted.

We were there, between October 2022 and March 2024, on twenty-three occasions.