She’d escaped into music and videos: Nirvana, Janet Jackson, and Salt-N-Pepa. But her favorite album for a whole year was by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and she played “Under the Bridge” a million times, because she did feel like she was her only friend, but who she wanted to look like was Mariah Carey, and she tried all kinds of ways—tiny curlers, sleeping in braids—to get her hair to do what Mariah’s did. Some days, she left early so she could fix her hair and makeup on her way to school; she ducked into the Quik Pik, and then bought gum or a pack of cigarettes on the way out so they wouldn’t get mad at her for being in the bathroom so long. She practiced singing “I’ll Be There.” If her mother had seen her—if her mother had noticed—she would have said, “What’d you do, stick your finger in a socket? You look like a clown.” But as soon as the house was behind her and she started walking, she felt better, soothing herself as she had for as long as she could remember: It’s okay. You can do this. They don’t know you. They have no idea who you are. And the same words worked at school. The same words work now—it’s okay, you can do this—though sometimes it’s harder than others; sometimes there is a lot more at stake.

She feels happy those days when Harvey is able to walk away without looking back, but it also hurts a little. She would be devastated if someday he flew the coop and never looked back. But Jason hasn’t ever turned away from her, and he has even more reason than Harvey might, given his early years in life when it was just the two of them moving from place to place. Her heightened sense of how terrible humans can be is the price one pays for being in the courtroom every day, an occupational hazard of one whose whole life is about recording the pounds and pounds of notes about weapons and threats and murder and guilt. How can it not invade your personal life?

“It’s okay, Harvey,” the teacher had said every morning. “And just think, next year you will walk in all by yourself.”