Six months after Marcus's sentencing, Ral stood in the offices of the Anderson Foundation for Criminal Justice Reform, watching Rebecca conduct an interview with a wrongly convicted man whose case their organization had just won. The foundation occupied what had once been Marcus's corporate headquarters, the irony not lost on anyone who worked there.
"Your conviction has been overturned," Rebecca told the man, a forty-year-old who had spent eighteen years in prison for a murder he did not commit. "You are free to go home."
The man wept openly while his family embraced him. Ral watched from the doorway, remembering his own seventeen-year-old self being led away in handcuffs for crimes he did not commit. Some cycles could be broken. Some wrongs could be righted.
"That is the twenty-third
