My husband had me sentenced to ten years for a two-million-dollar fraud I never committed, and in the courthouse corridor he pulled my grandmother’s ring off my finger and told me to enjoy it. I didn’t argue. I handed a folded piece of paper to the guard.

I found out what happened in those forty-one minutes about a year later, from Osgood Prewitt himself, over a cup of coffee he would not let me pay for.

He read the paper in the stairwell after they closed the van, standing by the door, and his first decision was to throw it away.

He said the reason he did not was not that he believed me. It was that the note had a name on it that he knew from a bus shelter advertisement, and he had spent nineteen years learning that the fastest way to be finished in his job is to be the man who threw away the piece of paper.

So he did the safe thing, which was to hand it up. He gave it to his shift lieutenant at eleven forty-one and said a sentence he had rehearsed on the stairs, which was: This may be nothing. It is above me either way.