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A year has passed since that night. St. Catherine’s is no longer in debt; the community raised the funds in record time. I still sit on the bench, but I am a different jurist. I look for the “third way”—the mediation, the delay, the human solution that doesn’t appear in the standard legal templates. I learned that my robe is not a shield against the world’s pain, but a responsibility to mitigate it.
Every Christmas Eve, I return to that street. I don’t sit in the shadows anymore. I stand on the porch with Sister Margaret and Thomas, watching the kids play in the yard of a house that stayed a home. I learned that while the law is a skeleton that holds society together, mercy is the heart that makes it beat. And sometimes, it takes two hundred men on motorcycles to remind a man in a black robe how to be human.
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