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I said I guess he wasn’t going to get out of prison and Mo She said it was the kind of thing you could never really know but that she was proud ofso hard

So how co?

Mom put her arm around me and said life was like that sometimes

We stood there for a long tiade, who never even moved toward his hay

Why doesn’t he move? I finally asked Why is he so crazy?

He’s spent a long ti for Dallas to come home

It was totally bizarre, but when she said that, it was like I already knew it, and when I looked at the horse’s face, I saw so like sadness in his eyes

That’s why he’s so banged up, Mo

I said I wish I kne to stop

Mom said me, too, little man Me, too

Chapter Twenty-eight

Winona was a wreck For the past twenty-four hours she’d been working nonstop: rereading the transcripts, rehearsing her oral argu ready for what could well turn out to be the single most important day in her life

Even a o, she would have been certain about the outcos Then, she’d had the kind of confidence that came from a belief that the world worked in a predictable way, that endings could be foreseen based on an understanding of the events that came before

Now she knew better The prosecution’s dogged determination to preserve the conviction had proven Vivi Ann’s point They had even thrown in a ridiculous argument about the requisite finality of verdicts—as if reliability were soht be an anied and certainly didn’t roam the halls of justice In her research for Dallas’s case, she’d read about more than one hundred men who’d been freed from prison in the past five years based on DNA testimonyand even more who hadn’t Those unfortunate souls were all too often in Dallas’s position: DNA evidence neither tied them irrefutably to the crime nor wholly exonerated them It amazed—and shamed—Winona how inflexible district attorneys and police could be once they decided on a defendant’s guilt Often no ahting, uments that kept innocent people in prison for decades

“Breathe,” Aurora commanded beside her