“I'll go through,” I said.
He looked embarrassed. I softened my voice and repeated that I was fine using the ordinary route.
It was not a test of his kindness. I simply did not want my first return to begin with a privilege offered so urgently that no one noticed what it implied about everyone else in line.
Keene met me after screening. He did not ask whether I was brave enough to use the elevator, only which way I preferred to go.
“The east stairs,” I said.
He carried the empty replacement briefcase Aaron had bought. The old clasp was damaged, and I could not yet look at it without hearing the papers scatter.
In chambers, my robe hung exactly where I left it. Someone had watered the plant by the window, and my clerk had left a short list of decisions that genuinely required my input.
I completed two items before the headache started. Then I stopped, angry with my body and relieved that nobody had arranged an audience for my return.
Keene brought coffee and sat near the door. For several minutes, we discussed a leaking window before either of us mentioned the corridor.
“I should have reached you sooner,” he said.
“You weren't there at the beginning.”
“I heard him shouting.”
“So did many people.”
His face changed. I had not intended the words as an accusation, but they landed on something he had already been thinking about.
“I've known him for years,” he said. “I knew how he spoke to people. I didn't know he would do that.”
I looked at the coffee cooling between us. “Did anyone ever ask whether his tone was part of a larger problem?”
Keene rubbed his hands together. He remembered a complaint from a woman at the security desk and a supervisor telling Rourke to be more patient.
He did not know whether there had been a formal finding. I told him to give the information to Morgan, including what he did not know, rather than trying to reconstruct a history for me.
“I don't want to become the person everyone confesses to because I have chambers,” I said.
“Understood.”
That afternoon, Hensley explained the conflict plan in writing. I would have no role in proceedings concerning the encounter, and any matter where my involvement or Rourke's participation created a genuine issue would be reviewed individually.
The plan was inconvenient. Cases could not simply be moved as a gesture of sympathy, and defendants should not lose time because an officer had injured someone who happened to work in the building.
I signed the acknowledgment and asked that the affected lawyers receive clear explanations. Their clients deserved more than mysterious changes in a calendar.
Iris showed me where the secured documents had been stored and handed over a list of the pages recovered. We checked the list without opening confidential files in the outer office, then arranged for anything needed in reassigned matters to reach the proper judge. Completing that small inventory eased a worry I had carried since the floor. The cases represented real people, and knowing the papers were accounted for allowed me to stop imagining them beneath strangers' shoes.
Before leaving, I walked as far as the fourth-floor landing. Keene stayed a few steps behind, giving me space without pretending I was alone.
The corridor was almost empty. A cleaner pushed a cart past the benches, and the place where my papers had fallen looked indistinguishable from any other stretch of marble.
My pulse climbed anyway. I kept one hand on the stair rail and waited until I could hear the ordinary sounds around me again.
I had spent years telling anxious witnesses to take their time. Now I understood how much trust that instruction required when the room itself held a memory.
After a minute, I turned back toward the stairs. I had not conquered the corridor, and there was no reason to call it that; I had visited my office, completed useful work, and learned where the limits were that day.
For the first time since the slap, that seemed like enough to ask of myself.
The first formal version of Rourke's account arrived through Denise on a Thursday afternoon. She asked me to read it at her office, where we could discuss it without my husband having to watch each sentence change my face.
The report described me as an uncooperative woman who refused identification, attempted to leave a lawful detention, and struck the officer in the chest. It said Rourke used an open-hand technique to create distance after I became aggressive.