I’ll make sure of that.
I breathe out now, slowly, and watch my own breath cloud the glass. I need to turn the air down.
On the table behind me, my laptop glows with a half-written memo: Immediate Post-Hearing Risk Assessment—Conti, Luca.
The bulleted lines stare back at me like impatient jurors. Heightened supervision granted. Twice-weeklyreporting. Passport surrendered. Electronic monitoring pending installation at the residence verified by Pretrial Services.
Prohibitions: contact with co-defendants, victims, witnesses. It is the kind of victory you say thank you for with gritted teeth because you need the conditions but hate the outcome.
I want to argue, even here, alone. I want to stand up in my living room and sustain and overrule. I want a transcript that says, “The Court regrets the inconvenience; justice is difficult.”
Instead, I have my big ass glass of wine, a still-unfamiliar city outside my window, and a man who smiled with his eyes when the gavel came down without actually smiling at all.
He’s good at making the performance look minimal. The best control reads like absence.
But I see through it all.
I force myself to write instead of just fume. I list names that have been my companions for months: Vito (28), Nico (26), Caterina (25). I note their placements, the way they flanked him, the way the room bent around them, too. Blood recognizes blood; it organizes space.
I add: Roberto Conti—counsel of record—presentation: polished, effective, anticipated objections; likely to pursue appeal of supervision intensity, potentially to manufacture flashpoints.
I add the line that matters most: Lucia—absent.
The word glows as if it can feel the importance. Absence is its own presence. She was there the last time the state closed the door on him. She wasn’t today. The file says she’s married to Nick Dixon—the billionaire casino magnate who bought a prison like most men buy a new suit.
I wrote that memo too, the one that laid out ethical conflicts like neatly stacked grenades ready to go off at any moment.
The state actor becomes an interested party by acquisition; the defendant becomes a man who must sleep, eat, breathe in an institution owned by a person who holds a personal vendetta against him.
It was academic rhetoric wrapped around an ugly fact. It didn’t matter today; none of that was technically before the Court. But it matters to me because people show you what they’ll do when they have enough money to treat our systems as personal toys.
Dixon did not make Conti’s last four years easy. Transfers denied. Comforts revoked. Guards rotated. Small humiliations that add up to a point: you’re not a man in a cage; you’re a toy in a box.
The law does not love it when you point out the defects of its own machinery.
Records. I pull up a spreadsheet that tracks every phone number that has touched the Conti case in the last six months. I color-code communications that spike on key dates. I match the map of his known associates to the new ones. I draw lines in my head to places and people. Blue for legitimate businesses. Yellow for question marks. Red for… everything else.
I pour another glass and drain half of it because the part of my brain that wants to object has decided to shut the hell up tonight.
“One more glass,” I say out loud. “One. Then water. Then bed.” The apartment does not answer. Just the way I like it.
I scroll to a clean page and write down what my body refuses to forget: He was handsome. Rugged, in the way that shows the planes of his face, the strength of his jaw. His mouth, with its full lips, didn’t move unless he chose to move it.
His posture was loose, but deliberately so. He did not bounce a knee. His hands sat calmly on the table. No fidgeting.
And his gaze was electric.
I delete the whole paragraph because this is a government computer, and there’s a difference between being honest with yourself and leaving an evidentiary trail of human weakness.
Then I write it again as something else: Subject presented as physically fit; affect under control; managed displays of attentiveness; maintained eye contact strategically; avoided unnecessary movement; confined reactions to micro-expressions.
My phone buzzes.
A text from my old supervisor in Manhattan: How’d it go?
I type: Conditions granted. Petition granted. Twice-weekly reporting. We’ll build the walls higher and wait.
He replies with a thumbs-up that manages to be both supportive and infuriating. The culture of this work is to dress patience up as strategy and strategy as inevitability.
