Quintero wrote something down. "And now?"
"Now I try to be the thing," Sean said. "Instead of having one."
At eleven-ten Rosado called a ten-minute recess. Sean was taken out. Nobody in the second row on the left spoke. Maureen went to the ladies' room and came back with her lipstick fixed. Antoinette Reddick sat with her eyes closed and her lips moving very slightly, and Neal thought she was praying, and then thought she was going over what she would say, and then thought that for her it might be the same thing.
When the board came back, Rosado said, "We'll hear now from those who wish to speak in support. Mrs. Dwyer."
Maureen spoke for six minutes. She stood at a small podium at the end of the front row with her reading glasses on and two index cards, and she told the board about Sean at four, at ten, at seventeen with his knee in a brace, and then she put the cards face-down and said, "He has called me every Sunday night at seven o'clock for fifteen years. He has never once missed. He has never once asked me for anything except to go see Mrs. Galvin's son's grave on his birthday and leave flowers for him, and I want the board to know that I do, every September, and I want Mrs. Galvin to know that I'm sorry, and that if she wants me to stop, I'll stop." She did not look across the aisle when she said it. She sat down. Across the aisle, Jada Galvin had put her arm around her mother's shoulders.
"Ms. Reddick," said Rosado.
Antoinette Reddick stood up. She left the tote bag but took the manila envelope with her to the podium, and when she got there she did not open it. She settled her reading glasses on her nose by their beaded chain, and looked over them at the board, and took them off again, and let them hang.
"Good morning," she said. "My name is Antoinette Reddick. I live in Randolph. I'm the volunteer program coordinator for South Shore Hospice and Palliative Care, and for the last eight years I've run the Hospice Companions program at MCI-Norfolk, which trains incarcerated men to sit with other incarcerated men who are dying. Before I say anything else I want the board to know that I'm a formerly incarcerated woman myself. I served three years at MCI-Framingham on a trafficking conviction from 2005. I have a pardon petition pending before this board, and some of you will see me again in December, on the other side of this. I don't believe that's a conflict, but I want it on the record before anything else is."
Rosado nodded. "Thank you, Ms. Reddick. So noted."