Reporters were already outside the house when I arrived. Not a crowd, exactly, but enough of them to make the street feel occupied: two vans, a handful of people with cameras held low, a young woman with a microphone who called my name as the cab door opened. I did not stop. I did not wave, did not scowl, did not give them a face to pair with a headline. Denise opened the garage door from inside and I went in through the garage, past the bicycles and the boxes we had never unpacked properly, and into the kitchen where the light was ordinary and no one was watching. The garage door closed behind me with a sound that felt, for the first time in my life, like relief rather than routine.
For three days I did not speak publicly about the incident. The silence was interpreted, as silence always is, as strategy. Commentators on television, whom I did not watch but whose summaries reached me anyway through friends who meant well, described it as discipline, as calculation, as a judge holding his cards. It was not any of those things. I was waiting for facts. I have spent thirty years telling people in my courtroom that you do not build a conclusion before you have the record, and I was not about to abandon that discipline at the moment it mattered most to me personally. I also knew, in a way I did not say aloud even to Denise, that I was waiting for something simpler: for my body to stop rehearsing the floor. For the bruise on my shoulder to stop announcing itself every time I reached for a shelf. For sleep to come without the sound of my own voice saying, there is no gun, into tile.
Denise understood the waiting better than anyone else could, which is to say she did not try to hurry it or dress it up. She made meals I barely tasted and left them where I would find them. She answered the phone and told people I was resting, which was true enough to be kind and vague enough to be honest. In the evenings we sat in the living room with the television muted and the lamps low, and she read while I stared at nothing in particular, and neither of us pretended this was normal. Once, on the second night, she put her hand over mine and said, “You do not have to decide anything yet.” I nodded, because she was right, and because deciding nothing was the only decision I was capable of making well.
On the fourth morning, the facts began to arrive, not publicly, but privately, in the way facts usually do when lawyers are involved: through a folder, through a screen, through a woman who did not waste time on comfort.
I had hired an attorney. I know how that sentence sounds coming from a judge. People assume a judge can represent himself, that the law is his native language and therefore his own case should be easy. It is not, and the assumption misunderstands both law and human nature. Representing oneself in a matter involving personal humiliation is rarely a sign of good judgment. I have watched competent, intelligent litigants walk into my courtroom and lose their footing the moment their own dignity became the exhibit. I did not intend to do that to myself, or to the record. So I hired Elena Park.
She had argued before my court twice. She won once and lost once, and I remembered both. The win was a suppression motion, argued cleanly, without theatrics, with a brief that anticipated every objection I was likely to raise and answered them before I could voice them. The loss was a civil case in which she pushed a theory one step further than the evidence would carry it, and I ruled against her in a written opinion that was, I hope, respectful and unmistakable. She took the ruling without visible resentment and without flattery afterward, which told me more about her than either argument had. I wanted someone who would not treat me as a judge first and a client second. I wanted someone who would tell me when I was wrong, especially when being wrong felt like self-protection.
She arrived at the house carrying a laptop and no sympathy, one of the reasons I had hired her. Denise opened the door and Elena stepped in with the brisk efficiency of a person who has already decided where she will sit and what she will need. She wore a dark suit, no jewelry except a plain watch, and she carried the laptop under one arm like a file she intended to use rather than display.
“You look better,” she said.
“I am devastated by the absence of concern,” I said.