Her scalp stung in thin, uneven lines where the blade had pressed too close. She could feel the absence of weight on her head, strange and immediate, like the phantom awareness of something recently lost.
The fluorescent lights in the corridor were identical to the ones in the room she had just left. And for a moment, the sameness of them felt deliberately cruel, as if the building itself was refusing to acknowledge that anything had changed.
She kept her pace steady. Not fast, not slow. The pace of a woman with somewhere to be.
Two clerks turned a corner ahead of her and stopped walking. She recognized them both. She had presided over cases that brought them to her courtroom.
The younger one, a woman in her late 20s named Patricia, put her hand over her mouth. The older one, a man named Gerald, who had worked in the building for 11 years, took a single step backward, as if he needed more distance to process what he was seeing.
Neither of them spoke.
Naomi nodded at them as she passed. A small, composed nod. The kind that said, "I see you seeing me, and I am not broken, and we don't need to make this into something we both have to recover from."
She turned left at the end of the corridor, then right at the next junction, moving through the back passages of the building toward the judges' wing. She had walked these corridors enough times to navigate them without thinking. That was useful now. Her mind was elsewhere.
She was organizing every face, every word, every detail. She was sorting them into rows in her memory, the way she sorted evidence in a complex case. Chronologically first, then by significance, then by what could be proved and what could only be known.
Voss's badge number. Pruitt's phone going up behind her. Crane at the wall, arms crossed, crucifix catching the light. The duffel bag already in the corner of the room. The drain in the floor.
The drain in the floor.
She turned that detail over in her mind as she walked. That room had not been improvised. That room had been used before. And not once. And someone in this building knew it.
She was halfway to chambers when she heard Thomas Avery's voice.
"Judge Ellison."
He was at the intersection of two hallways, still holding his bent manila folders, and the expression on his face was one she had never seen on him before.
And she had seen Thomas Avery through sentencing hearings, through courtroom evacuations, through the afternoon a defendant collapsed in the gallery and the paramedics took 11 minutes to arrive. She had seen him unshakable. She had seen him tired.
She had never seen him look like this. Like he was ashamed of being in the building.
"Not here," she said quietly, without stopping. "Walk with me."