I awaken this morning with a sense that Walt Garrity is alive and Serenity Butler sleeping peacefully two floors above me. Three seconds later, reality collapses upon me with crushing finality.

Walt is dead.

Serenity lies suffering in a hospital a hundred miles away.

Annie and Mia are hiding in FBI custody at Pollock FCI.

I remember this cruel trick of the brain from when my wife died, and from Caitlin’s death, too, of course. I suppose it’s akin to phantom-limb pain. Unable to accept such profound loss, the mind tries vainly to reset itself each night, in the hope that it can reset reality as well.

But nothing can.

I shower quickly, then hurry down to the kitchen to make some breakfast and try to think of a way to bolster my mother for today’s ordeal. My primary anxiety is whether the FBI has been able to restore the two erased videotapes, or will in time for them to be entered as evidence in the trial. But under that anxiety, like incipient panic bubbling beneath a surface of manageable fear, is the prospect that my father might, against all logic and advice, take the stand to testify in his own defense. A less cynical man than I might hope that his father wants to testify because he knows he has nothing to fear from whatever information those tapes contain. But I know better. You don’t blast a videotape with a high-intensity magnetic field because you have nothing to fear from it.

As I sit down with my coffee, I find a copy of the Natchez Examiner on the table. One of our guards probably left it for me. I skim the article about the gunfight and chase that ended Walt’s life, then turn to the opinion page. Instead of the expected piece by Miriam Masters, I find a long editorial by none other than Serenity Butler. Above the headline is a head shot cropped from the book jacket photo. Seeing those eyes that I now know so well, I feel a jolt of something I can’t put a name to.

Then I begin to read.

American history is punctuated by watershed moments, fulcrum points that separate one sense of ourselves (as a nation) from another. We study the classic ones in school, the American canon, mostly those from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: America’s declaration of independence from England; the Gettysburg Address, and John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of the president who gave it; the Scopes trial. For some reason, these transformations of the prevailing zeitgeist tend to involve wars, crimes, or trials of some kind. All too rarely, they involve signal human achievements, like the discovery of a polio cure, or the moon landing in 1969.