The AC is out of order on the subway for most of my ride downtown, so I hop out a couple stops early and dodge the dense foot traffic for ten blocks. Once I reach the precinct, I hover anxiously near the door for a moment, picking at my cuticles. After I finally push in and talk to someone at the front desk, another uniformed officer leads me through to the back where the air smells like burnt coffee and jelly donuts, then steers me through the bullpen to Glover’s desk. The first thing I notice is that she is a very organized upper millennial who not only went to Yale but also has a black belt and a massive Marvel obsession. She’s wearing a sweatshirt with NYPD across her chest in bright white letters, and as much as I wish she was not on their team, I couldn’t have done any of this without her on the inside.

Glover looks up from her desktop’s screen and sees me. I smile, and she smiles back.

“Brandi,” she says. “Nice to see you. You good?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say, because it’s hard to explain how I’m really feeling when so many emotions are fluttering around inside me at once.

Glover swings a chair over to me and offers me a cup of coffee, and I politely decline as I sit next to her desk and cross my legs. We spoke briefly on the phone last night, so my visit is not a surprise, but I still feel awkward being here. There’s something so intimidating and austere about this place, and somehow I can still feel the cuffs around my wrists from when I was being dragged through the maze.

I ask the obvious questions. I ask about Taylor. She reconfirms what we spoke about last night, runs through an abridged version of the arrest and the subsequent interrogation. Izzy did everything according to plan, and once she got Taylor’s confession, Taylor was arrested on the spot. The whole time she’s saying all of this I’m giddy inside, trying hard to keep a straight face and not laugh, but then she describes the look on Taylor’s face when she saw that Izzy was strapped with the wire, and I almost lose it.

You see this kind of shit in movies all the time and you know how it ends. Bad guy gets caught. Life moves on. But this isn’t a movie, and justice is promised to no one, especially not to people who look like me. So it’s different when it happens to you. I just wish I could have been there to witness it all.

“Did she cry?” I can’t help myself.

Glover holds my gaze for a beat, completely understanding the gravity of my question. “Not with me. I think she was too embarrassed to show any emotion.”