The judge will get back to her, they said. There will be questions. They might, for instance, ask how she could both work on things like a grocery list and a made-up account of the trial of a horrible asshole while also transcribing everything that is being said on the stand, and yet she can do that, she can! Like her mind is quick to seize upon words that get used and overused; she notices when the same word is repeated, and she notices when a word becomes popular all of a sudden, like cohort, and purchase—as in “traction,” and not “to buy”—words pulled from the back of the closet and then used and used, gaining purchase as they get used to death by the cohorts far and wide. She has always been able to do that. It’s her gift to be able to think these things, connect the dots, while also working and taking notes on everything else, but clearly the machinery has been screwing up lately. She is alone in the world, and her son is driving her crazy, and she would almost swear that someone did pass by the doorway of her bedroom last night, Harvey asleep for once, Peggy too deaf to hear. Of course she made a mistake; she’s human after all. She’s just a human, a “human bean,” as Harvey always says. She is a human who made an innocent mistake. Hasn’t everyone made mistakes? Hasn’t everyone needed to look away from something that was just too hard to see?

Harvey