"No."
"You never told him."
"Why would I tell him?" She turned and looked at Neal again, and for the first time there was something like anger in her face, but it was old, and it was banked very low, like a stove at night. "He walked into my training room in March of 2019 with his head down and his shoulders up around his ears, the way they all come in, and he sat in the back row, and when I went around the room asking why each man wanted to do this work, he said, Because I took somebody's life and I'd like to learn how to sit with one. I knew his name before he ever said it. I'd seen it on the list. I'd read the Enterprise like everybody else in Brockton, back in 2011. I knew whose son he was. I sat in my car in the lot at Norfolk for forty minutes before that first class and thought about not going in." She smoothed the envelope on her knees with her palm. "And then I went in. Because he wasn't you. And because what you did to me wasn't his to carry. He's got enough to carry."
Neal set the coffee on the carpet at last, by the leg of the chair. His fingers were red across the pads where the cup had been.
"What are you going to tell them?" he said.
"About Sean? The truth. That's all I've got."
"About me."
She considered him. "I haven't decided," she said. "I was going to tell them about my record, because I tell everybody. I don't walk into any room in this Commonwealth anymore without saying it first; I learned that the hard way, the first ten years out, when I'd get a job and get comfortable and then the CORI would come back and some manager would call me into the office with a face on him like I'd stolen the stapler. Now I say it first. I'm Antoinette Reddick, I'm a hospice program coordinator, I'm a grandmother, I did three years at Framingham for a drug trafficking conviction in 2005. Then they can do what they want with it." She looked down at the envelope. "And the board knows anyway. I've got a petition in front of them."
"A petition."
"For a pardon. This board is also the Advisory Board of Pardons, you know that? Same seven people, different hat. My hearing's December the second." She said the date the way people say the date of a surgery. "Ten years I've been eligible. I didn't file for most of them. I thought, what's the point, they give out four a year, they give them to people who know people. Then my supervisor at the hospice said, Antoinette, the state nursing board won't look at you for an LPN license with that on there, and you've been doing an LPN's job for nine years for an aide's pay, and you're the best I've got, so file the damn thing. So I filed it."