The judge dismissed the challenge inside of a single afternoon.
I didn’t celebrate that outcome, exactly. It didn’t feel like winning. It felt like finally understanding the whole shape of something I’d only ever seen pieces of while it was happening around me.
I still work the breakfast shift at Otis’s most mornings, same apron, same section by the window, though these days I own the roof over both our heads instead of just serving coffee underneath it.
I kept the booth by the window reserved on Tuesdays and Thursdays, eight o’clock sharp, even though nobody’s sat there in over a year now.
Some mornings, when the diner’s slow enough to let my mind wander, I think about Cornelius Vance’s old sentence, the one Odetta used to repeat like a riddle I hadn’t yet earned the answer to.
