Chương 183: CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-THREE: THE THING HOLLOWAY DID

Marcus did not go to Calla. He thought about it for four days and did not, because everything Marta had said pointed the same direction: an intervention from the Warden would make it a matter, and a matter would make it about the organization's need rather than her decision. He went to Holloway instead. Holloway received him in the records room's small annex, which had become his in the way that spaces became people's — nobody had assigned it, he had simply been there long enough. Marcus told him the whole thing.

Vance's observation, the deliberate flaw, Marta's four repetitions of I said no. Holloway listened without interrupting. When Marcus finished, he sat back.

"I have been waiting for someone to raise this," he said.

"I have not raised it myself because I did not know whether it was my place."

"You saw it in Vellenmoor," Marcus said.

"I saw it on the ride home," Holloway said.

"Four days out. She asked me a question and I gave her an honest answer and I have been uncertain ever since whether the honest answer was the right one."

"What was the question?" Holloway was quiet for a moment.

"She asked me: how many have you lost?" he said.

"Capital cases. In eighteen years." He paused.

"I said: three."

"And?" This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

"And she said: what happens to them. And I said—" Holloway stopped.

"I said: they are executed, and I attend, because if I argued for a man's life I do not think I should be permitted to look away from the outcome." Marcus sat very still.

"She was twenty years old," Holloway said, "and she had won her first one four days earlier, and I told her that there is a version of this work where you stand in a yard at dawn and watch a man die because you were not good enough." He paused.

"It is true. It is the truest thing about capital practice. And I said it to a twenty-year-old on the fourth night of the ride home from her first case."

"You couldn't have lied to her," Marcus said.

"No," Holloway said.

"But I could have waited a year." He paused.

"That is my error and I have been carrying it since August." He stood up and went to the window.

"There is a thing I have not told anyone," he said.

"I will tell you because it is relevant." He paused.

"I stopped taking capital cases for four years. Between my ninth year of practice and my thirteenth. After the second one I lost."

"What brought you back?"

"A woman in a village named Ordell asked me," Holloway said.

"Her son was accused and there was nobody else within sixty miles who could read the charter." He paused.

"I did not come back because I had recovered. I came back because the alternative was that a boy went to a proceeding with no one to speak for him, and I found that I could live with having failed and could not live with having declined." He turned from the window.

"That is what Calla is working out," he said.

"Not whether she is good enough. She knows she is good enough — she has evidence. She is working out whether she can live with the version of this where she is good enough and it does not matter." He paused.

"Nobody can tell her the answer. But somebody should tell her the question, because at twenty she will assume the question is about her competence, and it is not, and she will spend a year on the wrong problem."

"Will you tell her?"

"No," Holloway said.

"I told her the thing about the yard at dawn. Anything else I say lands on top of that." He paused.

"It should be someone who has no stake in whether she takes capital cases." Marcus thought about it.

"Okafor," he said. Holloway nodded slowly.

"Okafor loses people," he said.

"Regularly. Professionally. For fifteen years." He paused.

"And she has never once, in my hearing, described it as failure."