Outside the Courthouse

The press had gathered on the steps, more of them than Maren had expected, and she came out into the July heat with Renata beside her and found herself, for the first time in months, doing the thing she had trained a hundred clients to do and had never once had to do herself: walking through a crowd of cameras without a script.

She did not stop to speak. She had told Renata, days ago, that she would make no statement, that the sentencing memorandum and her own words in the courtroom were the only version of this she intended to offer publicly, and she kept to it now, moving through the shouted questions with her eyes forward, the flat July light bouncing hard off the courthouse stone.

Jonah caught up to her at the bottom of the steps, and fell into step beside her, saying nothing, the particular silent solidarity of a brother who had sat through his own version of this same hallway months earlier. Theo was a few steps behind, giving her the space she hadn't asked for but that he seemed, somehow, to understand she needed, the crowd thinning as they crossed toward the subway entrance on Pearl Street.

"Twenty-six months," Jonah said, once they'd put a block between themselves and the cameras. "That's less than I expected, honestly. I'd braced for worse."

"Renata thought it might be closer to three years given the scale of it. I think the restitution framework mattered more than either of us predicted." Maren stopped at the corner, waiting for the light, and found she was breathing harder than the short walk should have required. "I don't feel what I thought I'd feel. I thought I'd feel like something had ended. It doesn't feel like an ending. It feels like the actual bill finally arriving, after I spent months guessing at the total."

Theo caught up to them at the corner. He didn't say anything about the sentence itself. He simply stood beside her, close enough that his shoulder nearly touched hers, and after a moment he said, "I have five weeks before you self-surrender. I want to spend as many of them with you as you'll let me, and I understand if the answer is that you need most of that time for yourself, or for Jonah, or for getting your affairs in order. I just wanted to say it plainly, the way we've been trying to say things this year, instead of waiting for you to ask."

"I don't know yet what I need," Maren said. "I think that might be the most honest thing I've said all day, including in that courtroom."

"Then we'll figure it out as we go," Theo said. "The way we've figured out everything else."

They walked the rest of the way to the subway in silence, the three of them, through a July afternoon that had no particular interest in what had just happened to any of them, and Maren found, riding the train uptown with Jonah on one side and Theo's hand loosely in hers on the other, that the strange, unmanaged peace she had first felt in his apartment on the night of Adrian's arrest had not entirely deserted her, even now, even with a number attached to it, even with a date circled five weeks out that would take her somewhere none of them could follow.