Tim barely rose to his feet before Judge Andrews pronounced, “You are free to go.”
As he headed down the center aisle toward the courtroom doors, he was enfolded in an incredible loneliness. For the past several months, he’d been focused on one crisis after another, all of them immediate. Now he had the rest of his life to face. The events of the past forty-eight hours still hadn’t taken on a reality; it was inconceivable that he could be walking away.
The clamor of media rose as he stepped through the doors-glinting lenses, flashing bulbs, shouted questions. An army of reporters documenting his going free due to precisely those types of technicalities he’d committed such violence to protest. With some effort, police held their line at the sawhorses.
Tim continued down the marble courtroom steps, his eyes on the Federal Building standing tall and proud across the square.
When he glanced down, he saw Dray standing in the apron of calm at the base of the stairs, a twenty-meter stretch of sanity before the held-back horde. She was wearing the yellow dress with tiny blue flowers, the dress she’d worn the first time they’d met. He drew nearer, his pace slowed with disbelief, and saw that she was wearing her ring-no rock, no inscription, the plain, worn, twelve-karat band he’d given her on bended knee back when he couldn’t afford anything more.
The din seemed to recede-the scrape of cable on concrete, the babble into microphones, the strident queries-fading into inconsequentiality.
He paused a few feet from her, regarding her, unable to speak. The wind kicked up, blowing a strand of hair across her eye, and she left it.
“Timothy Rackley,” she said.
He stepped forward and embraced her. She smelled like jasmine and lotion and a touch of gunpowder around the hands. She smelled like her.
She pulled back her head and regarded him, hand on his cheek.
“Let’s get you home,” she said.