Even so, I felt the courtroom watching me. A lawyer asked if I was feeling better before stating his appearance, and I thanked him before asking that we turn to the matter on the list.
The first defendant was a woman accused of violating a release condition. Her lawyer said the missed appointment followed a bus breakdown; the prosecutor said the supervision office had no record of a call.
I listened to both. When the woman spoke over her lawyer, explaining that she had called three times, the courtroom deputy took a step toward her.
“Give counsel a moment to finish,” I said, keeping my voice level. “Then we will address the calls.”
The deputy stopped. Nothing dramatic happened, but I noticed how closely I watched his hand and how deliberately I kept my own hands still on the desk.
The woman's call history did not settle every issue. It did justify checking the number and time before treating silence in an office record as proof that she had made no effort.
We continued the matter briefly so the parties could verify it, with clear instructions and a return time. I did not decide in her favor because I had been hurt, and I did not decide against her to demonstrate that the injury had changed nothing.
That balance required attention. By lunch, I was more tired than I wanted to admit.
My clerk, Iris, brought a sandwich and asked whether I wanted the door closed. I said yes, then asked how the corridor had been for her since the incident.
She hesitated. I reminded her that I was asking as a colleague, not gathering another statement.
“People want to know which side I'm on,” she said.
“You collected papers.”
“Apparently that was a side.”
She described a supervisor asking whether the security log should be made less specific about the incident until the review ended. Iris had refused to change her original entry and instead offered to add a dated clarification if anything was inaccurate.
I set down the sandwich. “Have you told Morgan?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Don't tell me the rest if she asked you to keep the interview separate.”
Iris nodded. I was glad she had already acted without waiting for a judge to authorize her honesty.
The review later found that the supervisor wanted to avoid inflammatory wording, not destroy the entry altogether. That motive still did not justify replacing a contemporaneous record with a softer one without identifying the change.
The log remained intact. Its wording placed Keene's call for assistance before Rourke's supervisor recorded my identity, another small detail that prevented the official timeline from drifting toward convenience.
After court, Denise called with an update from the prosecutor's office. An outside prosecutor had been assigned to review the force, the reports, and the witness contact, with decisions expected after additional interviews.
“Expected isn't promised,” she reminded me.
I smiled despite myself. Lawyers sounded remarkably alike when trying to keep a client from building a future out of a calendar estimate.
Before leaving chambers, I reviewed the next day's schedule and marked two matters for conflict screening rather than making assumptions from names alone. My clerk would check the relevant involvement and notify counsel if a change was needed. It took time I would rather have used elsewhere, but administrative care was part of protecting people from consequences they had not caused. I switched off the desk lamp only after the instructions were clear enough for someone else to follow.
At home, Aaron noticed the ink still staining my thumb. I told him about the pen and the bus breakdown, then stopped before discussing the defendant's private details.
He listened while I described how hard it was to return without turning every ordinary exercise of authority into a test of my own recovery.
“You can pay attention without judging yourself every minute,” he said.
I washed my hands again. Most of the ink disappeared, leaving a faint mark that would take another day, and I decided to leave the courtroom's unfinished questions at work for one evening.
The prosecutor called on a Friday when I was between hearings. I asked her to speak through Denise at a scheduled meeting, unwilling to turn my chambers into an extension of an investigation in which I was a witness.
We met the following Monday. Special Prosecutor Amelia Cross explained that she represented the public, not me personally, and that her decisions had to rest on the evidence and the law rather than my position in the courthouse.