Same plastic bench by the door, except this time nobody was sitting on it, because five kids in their church clothes were standing at the front with their uncle, and the bailiff had given up trying to keep them in a line.
Judge Miller read the order.
He read it slowly.
Then he took off his glasses.
"Twenty-six years," he said, "I've been on this bench. I've signed a lot of orders. I signed one, a long time ago, that I've thought about more than the rest." He looked at me. "I'd like to read the names."
"Malik Odom Reese.
Jaya Odom Reese.
Zion Odom Reese.
Kenzie Odom Reese.
Elijah Odom Reese."
Odom.
I'd asked for it.
Ms. Cruz had said it was unusual — a middle name for all five, the mother's maiden name, my birth name, the name a seven-year-old had carried out of that building and a six-year-old had lost.
"It's the name she was going to find me under," I told her. "I want it on paper. I want it where nobody has to peel it off."
The judge read the last one.
Then he did the thing he'd done once before, that judges do not do.
He came down off the bench.
Behind him, in the gallery, was the county.
Not all of it.
Enough.
Ray in a tie he'd bought that morning.
Ms. Ortiz in the second row with a box of tissues she'd brought "for the kids" and had not once handed to a kid.
Ms. Cruz, who does not cry, with one hand flat on the rail in front of her.
The nine strangers who'd built the addition, in a row, in work boots, because they'd asked if they could come and I'd said the courtroom fit forty.
And, at the very back, a man in a good suit, alone, who had once shown up with a nail gun and not explained himself.
He didn't explain himself this time either.
He stood when the names were read.
