The trespass charge was dropped on the Thursday.
The criminal referral took fourteen months.
Vonetta pleaded to financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult and got probation, restitution, and a permanent record.
Royce pleaded to the original thefts — the ones I did three years for — which is how a thing like this actually ends in this country: not with a trumpet, but with a clerk entering a plea in an empty courtroom on a Wednesday afternoon.
I went to see Royce once.
County jail, forty minutes, through glass, eleven weeks after his plea.
He looked exactly the same, which surprised me more than anything else about that year.
“You came to gloat,” he said.
“No.”
“Then what.”
“I want to ask you one question and then I’ll go, and you can answer it or not.”
He shrugged.
“Three years,” I said.
“Not the money.
I don’t care about the money.
When they read the verdict and my father wasn’t in that courtroom — did you know she’d told him it was a different day?”
