I followed her and sat down. She went to the refrigerator, pulled out two beers, and came back to the table.

“You’re miserable,” she said. “You’re bored. I think you feel like you’re wasting your life, and it’s time to do something about it.”

She popped the top on a can of Budweiser and handed it to me.

“I’m not miserable,” I said. “I’m just a little upset. Seeing Dockery walk out the door today made me sick to my stomach.”

“So why don’t you do something about it?” she said.

“Do something? Like what?”

“Why don’t you go back to work? I remember when we were young you talked about going to work for the prosecutor’s office. Why don’t you give Lee Mooney a call and see if he can find a place for you?”

The suggestion took me by complete surprise. Even sitting there watching Alexander Dunn botch a trial, knowing I could do much better, going back to practicing law hadn’t entered my mind. I’d quit a year earlier after spending more than a decade as a criminal defense lawyer. I made a lot of money, gained a lot of notoriety, and was good at what I did, but the profession eventually burned me out mentally, physically, and emotionally.

Friends and acquaintances had always asked me, “How can you go into court and represent someone who you know is guilty?” My answer was always that my job was to make certain the government followed its own rules and to hold them to their burden of proof. It didn’t have anything to do with guilt or innocence. I convinced myself for years that I was doing something honorable, that I was an important cog in the machine that called itself the criminal justice system. But over time, and especially after I realized I’d helped Billy Dockery escape punishment for murdering a defenseless elderly woman, I began to regard myself as something much less than honorable. It had been a little more than a year since I’d helped two women walk away from a charge of murdering a preacher. The preacher’s son tried to kill me in the parking lot outside of the courthouse, and he nearly killed my wife in the process. That was enough.