Rebecca prepared me to testify the way she prepared any witness who had lived the facts rather than studied them, which was to start with the truth and then to protect it from my own desire to tell it well. She asked me questions the way a cross-examiner would, not to frighten me but to harden me, and she stopped me whenever I answered with a conclusion instead of an observation. She asked what I saw, not what I believed Sandra intended, and she asked what the notice said, not what I felt when I read it, and she asked what date was on the rule, not what I thought about the fact that it had been backdated to 14 March. At first it felt like she was stripping the story of its heart, and I told her so, and she smiled, a tired, kind smile, and said the heart would be there anyway, in the facts themselves, and that a jury would feel it more if I did not try to force it on them. We practised the hardest parts, the parts about Amara, because I knew I would be asked about her, and I knew I would have to answer without turning her into a prop. I told Rebecca that Amara was fourteen, that she had lost her mother in 2021, that she had watched her father fight a homeowners association over a car, and that she deserved to be a schoolgirl again rather than a witness to adult failure. Rebecca wrote that down, not as a line for me to deliver, but as a boundary she would defend, and she told me she would object if any question tried to pull Amara into the case for effect. I trusted her on that, because she had never once treated my daughter as leverage, and neither had Pierce or Hayes, and that restraint mattered to me more than any promise of a result.
Pierce, Hayes, and Rebecca met together once with me present, and that meeting, in a conference room with a whiteboard and a timeline taped to the wall, was the first time I saw the whole case laid out as a single arc rather than as separate incidents I had survived one by one. The fines, the backdated rule, the duplicate minutes from Alice Monroe, the audit, the counter-suit that had failed, the night tow and the arrest of Ray Sullivan, the recall vote, and now the charges being prepared, all sat on that timeline in order, and seeing them there did something to me that I had not expected. It made me realise how long this had gone on, and how much of my life it had consumed, and also how much of it I had endured without fully understanding the shape of it while I was inside it. Pierce pointed to the gaps in the timeline, the places where the prosecution still needed a document or a confirmation, and he was honest about those gaps, and Hayes noted which ones he was closing, and Rebecca noted which ones concerned my testimony. Nobody pretended the case was already won, and nobody asked me to pretend either. Tyler's theft and chop-shop history sat on that timeline too, confirmed as evidence, not rumour, and Pierce explained how it would be introduced, carefully, through records and through witnesses who could speak to it directly, rather than through insinuation. I left that meeting exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with physical tiredness, and I drove home in silence, and I sat in my driveway for a few minutes before going inside, looking at the house where Amara was doing her homework, and I thought about how much I wanted this to end, and how much I wanted it to end rightly, and how those two wants were not always the same.
In the weeks that followed, my life settled into a rhythm that was almost normal, and almost normal felt like a gift. I went to work at the warehouse, where the problems were logistical and solvable, where a shipment either arrived or it did not, and where nobody fined you for parking a vehicle you owned. I drove Amara to school and to her activities, and I cooked dinners that were not interrupted by phone calls from lawyers, although there were still calls, and I answered them promptly, because I had promised Rebecca I would. Elena Ruiz stopped by once with a casserole, not because anything was wrong, but because that is what neighbours do when they have decided to be neighbours again, and Kevin Brooks waved from his yard, and Harold and June Parker invited us for a Sunday afternoon that had nothing to do with petitions or votes, and I accepted, because I wanted Amara to see that the neighbourhood could be a place of ordinary kindness, not only a place of meetings and ballots. Alice Monroe, who had led the recall with such discipline, stepped back from the front of things with the same discipline, and she told me she was glad to be an ordinary board secretary again, keeping accurate minutes, which was, she said with a dry smile, a more radical act than most people realised. I laughed, and it was a real laugh, the first in a long time that did not have an edge to it, and I realised that the recall had given us something beyond Sandra's removal. It had given us a record we could trust, and people we could trust to keep it.