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The cold air of Christmas Eve bit through my wool coat as I sat in the darkened interior of my sedan, watching the flashing blue lights of the sheriff’s cruisers. My name is Harold Matthews, and for twenty-two years, I have been a judge. My life has been defined by the rigid application of the law, a world of black robes, leather-bound statutes, and the heavy finality of a gavel. But that night, the weight of my own signature felt like a leaden stone in my chest. Three days prior, I had signed the eviction order for St. Catherine’s Children’s Home. The law was clear: the bank had foreclosed, the appeals were exhausted, and the property had to be vacated.
I shouldn’t have been there. Judges are meant to be the architects of consequences, not the witnesses to them. Yet, some gnawing sense of guilt had driven me to this street corner to watch twenty-three children, aged four to seventeen, be ushered out into the winter night to be processed into the state’s overcrowded system. I watched as Sheriff Tom Bradley, a man I’d shared coffee with for a decade, clutched the paperwork with trembling hands. He was a man of duty, but even duty has its limits when it involves traumatizing orphans on the holiest night of the year.
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