Her eyes kept getting bigger and I really was starting to worry they’d pop out of her head. But I had to keep talking until I was done. I also wanted Patrice to hear this, to know that I’d finally understood what he’d been trying to tell me, even if his way of relaying the message made it hard for me to hear it.

“Last week someone I love was stopped by the police,” I said as my interviewer gasped like she was at the intense part of a movie. “I was talking to him on the phone when it happened. I’d called him to ask why he was so far behind, and teased him about how cautious he was when driving.” She grimaced at that, as if she knew what happened next.

I cleared my throat and relaxed my muscles like I did whenever I was in court and I knew I had the last shot at driving my point home. “When he told me he was being stopped by the police I thought to myself, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been this terrified.’ The first thing he did was switch our call to FaceTime, and I knew he was scared for what would happen and wanted someone to be able to witness the stop.” I shook my head, remembering how frantic those moments felt. When Patrice told me he feared I’d live with the guilt of something happening to him.

“It’s so wrong that anyone has to feel like that. I’ve told myself a million times that the people I know and work alongside every day in this county are good people, and they are. But there is another reality, people of color fear for what could happen to them when they’re stopped by police, and you only have to do a quick Google search to find more than enough tragedies all over the country to warrant that fear. Both those things are happening at the same time, and one of those two groups hold a lot of the power to shift that reality.”

I tried to keep my face neutral as I always did in crucial moments, but my heart was pounding. I knew that with every word I said I was probably making another enemy. “Denying the reality of what our neighbors experience will not make us safer. We need to do better. I need to do better, and there is a lot that I have to learn. I don’t think I’ve done the work yet to be the kind of DA this county needs, so today I’m officially withdrawing my candidacy for District Attorney.”

I sat there smiling woodenly and waiting for my very stunned interviewer to react. After a second she blinked and finally got with it. “That is a very bold statement, since so far there had been no mention of these incidents. Is your partner all right?”