“Who will make sure you don't?” he asked.
I almost smiled.
Then he said, “Don't tell me I did enough.”
“I wasn't going to.”
“Good.”
We stood quietly beside the courtroom door.
His refusal to ask for reassurance felt like the first honest place either of us could stand.
I saw Talia Brooks properly for the first time on a news clip.
She stood outside her lawyer's office wearing the camel coat dispatch had described. Long braids fell over one shoulder. She was taller than the reporter beside her, and her expression suggested that she had already answered several versions of the wrong question.
“What do you think about an officer mistaking you for a judge?” he asked.
Talia looked at him.
“He didn't mistake me for anybody. He stopped her.”
The reporter tried again.
“Yes, but the mistaken identity—”
“I understand. You're asking whether I'm embarrassed that she got treated like me.”
He lowered the microphone slightly.
She continued.
“I want to know why people keep explaining that he wouldn't have done it if he'd known who she was. What would have been acceptable if it had been me?”
The clip ended soon afterward.
I watched it twice.
Not because she defended me. She did not know me, and she had no obligation to make my injury the center of her day.
She had simply refused the comparison everyone else seemed eager to arrange.
Judge and defendant.
Credible and doubtful.
A woman the officer should have recognized and a woman whose treatment required no further question.
Ruth found me sitting with the paused image on my screen.
“I need to know what happened to her that morning,” I said.
“You need to stay out of her case.”
“I know.”
“Those are different things.”
I closed the clip.
She was right again.
I notified Whitcomb that any matter involving Talia should remain outside my assignment while the connection created a conflict. I did not call her lawyer to discuss her criminal case or pull a file to satisfy my curiosity.
The administrative sequence reached me later through investigators and public reporting, separately from decisions about her charges.
She had checked in at pretrial services at eight thirty-four and signed the attendance sheet. A temporary employee directed her to Courtroom 3C but pointed toward the wrong stairwell.
Talia reached two, followed an old sign, and waited outside a room where no one called her name.
Her telephone had little reception. She tried to reach her lawyer, then asked a cleaner for directions.
At eight fifty-one, the courtroom requested someone locate her because counsel had not yet found her.
The request was not a finding that she was fleeing.
By the time Briggs stopped me, Talia was on her way upstairs with the cleaner's directions written on a scrap of paper.
She entered 3C six minutes after Sam found me in the corridor.
Later that day, a warrant in a separate probation matter affected her custody status. That separate issue became an excuse for people online to treat every assumption made about her morning as justified.
The facts did not work that way.
A person could have an unresolved legal obligation and still be lost in a public building. A later arrest did not transform an earlier request for directions into evasion.
Talia's lawyer, Nadia Flores, corrected the sequence in a short statement.
She asked reporters not to approach her client outside required appearances. She also asked them to stop describing Talia as the woman responsible for the incident involving me.
I saved the statement.
For days, I had been asked whether I was ready to forgive, sue, speak publicly, return to normal.
Talia had been asked why a judge's injury now carried her name.
It was another consequence of the same assumption: she had become part of the explanation before anyone asked what she had done.
Nadia also corrected a report that described her client as missing for an hour. The actual sequence involved minutes, a mistaken floor, and a courtroom request made before anyone checked the attendance sheet downstairs. The correction drew little attention. An hour sounded like evasion. A few confused minutes sounded like a building that needed better signs. Only one version was supported by the times.
At home, Denise asked whether I wanted to send her a message.
I did want to.
I also understood that a message from a sitting judge could carry pressure even if every word intended kindness.
“Through counsel, if at all,” I said.