Marisol sat with her spine straight and her hands in her lap and the expression of someone receiving something in full. Not managing it. Receiving it. At one point, in the third hour when the documentation of the financial trail was being read into the record — the specific amounts, the specific years, the specific decisions that had kept the operation funded across four decades — I saw her close her eyes for a moment.
Just a moment. Then she opened them.
She looked at the adjudicator.
I sat between Dax and Patricia.
Dax was very still throughout. Not the controlled stillness of the early weeks — that stillness had been suppression. This was different. This was the stillness of someone who is completely present in something and is letting it be completely present in them. Occasionally
