“You didn’t listen,” I said.
I want to be precise about my tone when I said this, because the story of what I said has been told in ways I did not say it. I was not angry. Anger had not been what I felt throughout — I had felt the acute, clarifying awareness I mentioned, and something underneath it that was closer to sadness, the specific sadness of a person who had spent twenty years working within a system and had hoped that the system was better than what she had just experienced.
I said it with finality.
Not punishment. Finality. The statement of a fact that had been demonstrated.
“You thought this was just another stop,” I said. “It wasn’t.”
Then I adjusted my sleeve and walked toward the officials, because there were things to be done and a courtroom to get to and a case that needed the kind of attention I had spent twenty years learning to give.
