A Lawyer Who Had Already Seen This Before
Nearly two hundred miles away, Margaret Holloway was finishing dinner alone in her small apartment when the evening news interrupted the quiet routine of her retirement.
For decades she had been one of the most respected criminal defense attorneys in the country until a heart condition forced her to step away from the courtroom. Since then her days had been filled with medication schedules and memories of cases that still visited her dreams.
When the television showed Nathaniel Carver’s face, something in her chest tightened.
The reporter explained that a last-minute conversation between a condemned man and his daughter had forced the state to suspend the procedure for seventy-two hours.
Margaret slowly set her fork down.
Thirty years earlier she had represented a man who had also insisted on his innocence. She had been young then, inexperienced, and she had failed to convince the court to reconsider the evidence. Years later, the truth surfaced, but by then it was far too late to give that man his life back.
Margaret reached for the phone and called an old colleague.
“Henry,” she said when he answered, “I need the entire case file for Nathaniel Carver. Every page of it.”
A Quiet Orphanage and a Frightened Child
The next morning Margaret drove to a small state-run shelter outside Columbus, Ohio, where Emily had been living for several months.
The director, Patricia Leland, welcomed her cautiously but listened as Margaret explained why she had come.
