When Gregory says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did they do it?’ But when he [Cromwell] says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did the court find them so?’ The lawyer's world is entire unto itself, the human pared away. It was a triumph, in a small way, to unknot the entanglement of thighs and tongues, to take that mass of heaving flesh and smooth it on to white paper: as the body, after climax, lies back on white linen.

Most nights her dad left the house again after dinner to meet with poor people he was defending in court for little or no money … In tenth grade, for a school project, Patty sat in on two trials that her dad was part of. One was a case against an unemployed Yonkers man who drank too much on Puerto Rican Day, went looking for his wife's brother, intending to cut him with a knife, but couldn't find him and instead cut up a stranger in a bar. Not just her dad but the judge and even the prosecutor seemed amused by the defendant's haplessness and stupidity. They kept exchanging little not-quite winks. As if misery and disfigurement and jail time were all just a lower-class side-show designed to perk up their otherwise boring day.

On the train ride home, Patty asked her dad whose side he was on.

‘Ha, good question,’ he answered. ‘You have to understand, my client is a liar. The victim is a liar. And the bar owner is a liar. They’re all liars. Of course, my client is entitled to a vigorous defense. But you have to try to serve justice, too. Sometimes the PA and the judge and I are working together as much as the PA is working with the victim or I’m working with the defendant. You’ve heard of our adversarial system of justice?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well. Sometimes the PA and the judge and I all have the same adversary. We try to sort out the facts and avoid a miscarriage. Although don’t, uh. Don't put that in your paper.’