The appellate packet came up easier than I expected once I knew where to look, a public filing index Vera found through the Northern Federal Appeals Court's own site, dated March 2017, three years after the verdict and almost three years before the transfer that still sat crosswise in my memory like a dropped tool nobody had picked up.
We read it at my kitchen table on Saturday morning, coffee between us instead of the shop's clutter, and the language was drier than the news coverage had been at the time, which I only half remembered anyway. The court had considered several claims, procedural and substantive, and had declined each in turn. The conviction stood. All of it. Nothing about the eleven counts moved an inch.
"She raised an immunity claim too," Vera said, running a finger down the third page. "Said she'd been promised protection from prosecution. But an assertion isn't an established promise, and it didn't get her conviction overturned. We can't read this as proof she had the protection she claimed."
"I remember hearing something like that when it happened," I said. "Just a headline, a sentence on a radio broadcast. I don't think I understood it as anything except, good, it's over, she's not getting out."
"For us, it wasn't only about whether she'd get out," Vera said. "It was about what people could later claim she'd been promised. The conviction standing doesn't turn her version into a finding. And whether somebody treated her as protected, informally, is a different question. We shouldn't make this filing answer more than it does."
I got up and found my old composition book where I'd left it since Vera returned it, flipped past the 1998 entries to a page further in, 2017, where I'd apparently written myself a note after hearing the appeal news on the radio at the shop. My handwriting was smaller than usual, cramped into the margin like I'd been embarrassed to give it full space.
Appeal denied, I'd written. Conviction final. Not our problem anymore, whatever happens to her now.
I read it out loud to Vera, and she didn't say anything right away, just looked at me with an expression I couldn't quite name, somewhere between disappointed and unsurprised.
"That's the sentence," I said. "That's the one I need to cross out."
"Why that one, specifically," she asked, though I think she already knew.
"Because it's wrong on its own terms," I said. "The conviction being final didn't retire anybody's job. I was still working intake then. Keeping her alive and safe remained somebody's work every day, wherever they held her, for a sentence that was never going to finish running in her lifetime. I wrote 'not our problem anymore' like a closed case meant a closed obligation. Those aren't the same thing. A verdict ends a trial. It doesn't end custody."
I took a pen from the kitchen drawer and drew a single line through the sentence, not scribbling it out entirely, just enough that I could still read what I'd once believed under the correction, a kind of visible retraction instead of a hidden one.
"Lawful custody," Vera said slowly, watching me do it, "keeps being somebody's job every single day she's alive in it. The appeal losing doesn't transfer that job to nobody. It just means the conviction isn't up for debate anymore. Everything after that is still live."
"I think I let the finality of the conviction stand in for the safety of the custody," I said. "Like one big official yes meant I didn't have to keep asking smaller questions after."
"That's a comfortable way to stop paying attention," Vera said. "I'd know. I did something similar for a few years after 2014, let the verdict be the whole story in my head, until 2019 made me ask harder questions again whether I wanted to or not."
We sat with that a while, the coffee going lukewarm, my corrected diary page open between us like a confession I'd written to myself six years before I understood what I was confessing to. I didn't know yet exactly what October 2019 was going to ask of me when we finally got there. But I knew the appellate ruling wasn't going to answer it for me, and neither was my own old handwriting, no matter how many lines I drew through it.