When Nora was done marching me through the murder of Ruby Graham and Daddy’s conviction, I was in a deep funk. In all my life up to this point — all thirteen years of it — I’d never once thought Daddy was guilty, mainly because he told me he was not guilty, and so did Ma. But after hearing about the girl getting shot, and hearing about what kids like Juanda Tillery, Monique Catron, and Travis Golson had said, it sure sounded like Daddy did it. Just thinking this way made me feel kind of crazy.

I wasn’t hungry at supper that night, even though Ma made one of my favorites, turkey tortilla pie, a recipe she’d found in a cookbook for kids. I wasn’t in a talkative mood, either, even though dinnertime was when Ma and I usually went over how the day went. Mine stunk, that’s for sure. Sometimes at the table we did “Thorns and Roses,” sharing the worst and best thing that happened, but I didn’t want to go there. The whole day seemed like one giant prickly pile of thorns.

After barely eating a thing and saying nothing, I drifted into the living room and plopped onto the couch while Ma cleaned up. Stacked in front of me on the coffee table were three books I had to read for the Weld — “independent reading” they called it. In the spring we’d had so much excitement: I’d gotten myself into private school, and Nora Walsh had become Daddy’s lawyer. But at that moment, on the couch, I felt like a feather pillow that was flattened, all its feathers gone.

I stared at the books the Weld had assigned to seventh-graders. Ma had left them there for me. She’d bought them at a used bookstore we went to, the Book Rack, which luckily happened to have all three.

I looked at the titles. The Catcher in the Rye was one, The Giver another, and To Kill a Mockingbird was the third. From the summaries, I could see why the Weld picked Catcher; it was about a boy from a private boarding school. Jeez, like I cared. To me, the most interesting one looked to be Mockingbird, about a girl named Scout. Ordinarily I’d pounce and begin devouring it. I wasn’t in the mood.

I noticed Ma leaning against the kitchen entry. She was drying her hands on a towel and looking at me. The way she was framed in the door, with her silhouette aglow from the kitchen light behind her, reminded me how pretty she was, and how young, too, compared to other mothers I’d seen during my visits to the Weld’s campus.

“Nora called,” Ma said. “Tough day?”

I nodded. Ma walked over and sat next to me.

“None of this is easy, Trell. None of it.”

I leaned into her shoulder. “How do you do it, Ma?”

That’s when Ma put her arm around me and talked for a while about her and Daddy, going back almost to the beginning, when they were together in their tiny apartment above the Humboldt Superette, excited to be having a baby. She knew about Daddy dealing drugs, but he was promising to stop. “He was one month into a class at the tech school to learn a trade. He wanted to be an electrician. But Ruby Graham was killed, and nothing was ever the same.”

Then Ma started telling me things I never knew before. “You were still a toddler at the time,” she said, “and it was maybe the lowest point in all of this.

“Daddy’s very first legal appeal had been rejected by the court, and I never saw him so down. He lost all hope.” During the next visit, she said Daddy insisted she move on and find someone else. “He demanded that I walk away from him, told me he didn’t want me to come see him anymore. There was no reasoning with him.” On the next visiting day, Ma said, he wouldn’t even come out to see her. The prison visits stopped. Four months passed. Ma said, “I even went on a date, someone your aunt fixed me up with.” My eyes widened. This was news to me.

Ma saw my reaction, and she chuckled. “Let’s just say it did not go well.” Ma looked at me. “The thing is, Trell, it wasn’t like my feelings for your daddy had changed. It was circumstances that were different. I was a single mother, taking care of you, and when I looked around, I saw way too many broken homes. I wasn’t going to let that happen to us. I mean our home was broken, with Daddy being in prison. But it was broken from the outside, not on the inside. Daddy loved me, and I loved him.

“Because your daddy wouldn’t see me, I wrote all this down in a long letter. It was my letter of demand, I suppose, because I demanded he see me and stop all his nonsense. He did, and by the time I left the prison, we were back on track. We got married soon after, too — a promise is a promise. It’s never easy, Trell, you know that yourself.”

We sat still for a moment.

“Ma?”

“Yes, Trell?”

“The case against Daddy, what Nora told me, it looks so bad.”

“I know.”

“You ever have any doubts? About Daddy’s innocence, I mean.”

Ma gently took my face in her hands and looked at me. “No, Trell. I know him — my husband, your father. No way he would ever hurt anyone.”

I felt better after talking to Ma, and I felt even better after I got to Nora’s office the next afternoon. Nora told me the worst was over. “That’s the government’s case, what I’ve been telling you,” she said, “and it’s painful to hear, I know.”

Then Nora said, “But I don’t buy it.”

She said she had this feeling after studying the case — an instinct is what she called it — that something was rotten. She said her doubts partly had to do with the prosecutor, meaning the lawyer who conducted the criminal trial for the government. “When it comes to justice, I don’t trust Frank Flanagan.”

She said there were things about the case she had noticed right away as she went through all of the documents and materials from the murder case:

Like Frank Flanagan telling reporters on the day Romero Taylor was arrested that he had “many, many witnesses” who incriminated him.

But Nora, after looking through the police documents, said police did not conduct their first interviews with Flanagan’s three key witnesses — Juanda, Travis, and Monique — until four months after Daddy’s arrest.

Like Mr. Richard Boyle, the main homicide detective, saying Romero Taylor was a member of the Castlegate Boys.

But when Nora came across the records from the police department’s gang unit, which kept books that were kind of like photo albums and listed the members of the different gangs, Daddy was not listed as belonging to Castlegate or to any street gang.

Or this: even if Mr. Boyle was right, and Romero Taylor was Castlegate like he claimed, Nora said it made absolutely no sense.

“They say your daddy was part of Castlegate? But he and your Ma lived on Humboldt Ave., and there’s no way that could happen. You can’t have a Castlegate gang member living on Humboldt. The Humboldt Raiders wouldn’t allow it. Your daddy, he’d be a dead man.”

This made the most sense to me of all the points Nora was making. I lived here, and what Mr. Boyle was claiming showed he certainly did not.

Nora said it was going to take time, “like peeling an onion,” and that’s pretty much how we’ve spent the past year. Nora wading carefully through box after box of documents, poring over the material, and writing notes about things she came across that didn’t make sense to her, notes that filled pages. Then she put the notes into separate folders. Her folders grew into a pile on the wooden table. October turned into November, which turned into December, and then came January of this year, when Nora said she had to start writing the appeal. She threw some legal terms at me I’d never heard before — writ of habeas corpus, for example, which Nora said was Latin for the document a lawyer files in court when they want a judge to review the legality of their client’s imprisonment. Nora said it was probably easier to call what she was writing an “opus,” or, more accurately, a motion for a new trial. But I actually liked the sound of habeas corpus.

“How’s the habeas corpus comin’?” I’d ask Nora when I got to her office.

“It’s coming,” Nora would reply, “slowly.” Because the writing took time, that’s for sure. Nora was not getting paid for working on Daddy’s case. We couldn’t afford to. So Nora juggled the appeal with working on cases where she earned money. Plus, Nora said, this was the first time she’d taken on a legal project like Daddy’s. Sometimes she’d look at the pile of folders and say it looked like a big mass of clay, and she compared her challenge of writing a motion to a sculptor carving a sculpture from a clay slab.

“You get what I mean, Trell?” she’d say, rubbing her chin and staring at the pile of folders — the clay — atop the wooden table.

Her goal, she said, was to channel everything she was thinking about into the idea that Daddy’s lawyer at his trial was a complete bust — which, like I said before, is called “ineffective assistance of counsel.” I mean, this first lawyer didn’t even bring up the fact that Daddy had an alibi — because when Ruby Graham was shot, Daddy was with some of his friends in an apartment a few blocks away. Anybody knows you can’t be two places at once. But the lawyer did not get those friends to testify at the trial that Daddy was with them. How bad is that?

Finally, in February, Nora was finished. I got all excited in a way that surprised me, because, while that was a good thing for sure, it wasn’t like anything had actually happened. Nora had gotten the legal paperwork all in order. That’s it. But after nearly nine months, as I got closer to being fourteen, a part of me had begun feeling life would always be this way — Nora working on, but never finishing, the appeal.

So when Nora was done, and as I watched the pages spewing out of the printer in her office, I got this over-the-top feeling, as if someone had announced Daddy was being set free. It was crazy, I know, but I felt a joy. The joy felt big, and I wanted to share it, but I knew I couldn’t. It had to be kept secret — at the Weld, I mean. Because during the year I’d never talked to anyone at my new school about Daddy’s situation.

But apparently I wasn’t too good at hiding the feeling. The next day, the same day Nora planned to bring the paperwork for the appeal to court, my math teacher was pacing back and forth holding a piece of chalk when she abruptly stopped in midsentence in front of my desk.

“Van Trell,” she said.

I looked up at her. “Yes?”

“What’s so amusing?”

“Amusing?”

“The smile. Ever since you sat down. You’ve been smiling.”

I realized the problem right away. I never smiled when I was at the Weld. Never. Which meant even the slightest one was noticeable, a break in my everyday face. My math teacher had picked up on the crazy joy I was feeling inside. The joy I hadn’t been able to hide. Quickly I made the smile go away.

“Nothing,” I replied.

“Well, it seems like something. Why not share it with us?”

I repeated, “Nothing.”

That afternoon after school, me, Nora, and Ma walked with a purpose to the clerk of court’s office at Suffolk County Superior Court in downtown Boston, where Nora filed the writ of habeas corpus, all 249 pages of it.

Then came the wait.

February. March. April. May. June.

Waiting.

Ma and I kept up our visits on Saturdays, riding to the prison in Big Vinnie’s Van, and we were waiting. Daddy got into a fight trying to protect a new inmate, and we were waiting. In May I turned fourteen, Daddy turned thirty-five in early July, and we were still waiting. We did our little birthday things in the visiting room, but it was like we were jittery or something. I could tell when I added the photo of Daddy and me to the photo wheel on my bedroom mirror. It was on our faces. The smiles are forced, distracted.

It was summer, and still we were waiting. I tossed and turned at night. Noise leaked into my bedroom now that my window was cracked open. I heard car engines revving, shouting, police and ambulance sirens, even the occasional pop, pop, pop of a gun. But I’d grown up with those sounds. They weren’t what kept me awake. It was all the stuff on my mind. Like Daddy getting into fights. That sure worried me, even if part of me was proud he was sticking up for someone else. Or Officer White — the way he seemed to be trying to provoke Daddy so Daddy would get into trouble. Or the appeal — that was the Big Thing, because that’s the legal thing Nora had been working on for so long, and now it has been five months since Nora submitted it to the court.

I was on pins and needles. In the daytime Ma went to her new job as an assistant manager of the CVS store in Dudley Square, and on her way she’d drop me off at the Orange Line T stop to take the subway downtown to Nora’s office.

Each day I’d ask Nora, “Any word?” Not “Hello, Nora,” or “How are you, Nora?” but, “Any word?” Nothing else seemed to matter, except waiting to get word from the court. “Not yet,” Nora said. “Not yet.” She tried to keep herself busy with her other cases, and I tried to keep busy helping her. But really there was not a whole lot to do, and we waited.

Then came the Wednesday morning the second week of July. Ma was rushing to get out of the apartment so she wouldn’t be late for work when the phone rang.

“You need to come down here.”

It was Nora.

“I have work,” Ma said.

“No,” Nora said. “Call in, tell them something. You need to come. Trell, too.”

The front lobby of Nora’s law office was empty when we arrived. We looked around and walked farther into the office. That’s where we found Nora. She was lying on the couch with one arm covering her face. On the floor, sheets of paper were scattered about. It looked like she was passed out.

“Nora?” I said.

She turned her head. “Don’t say it,” she said.

I think she meant don’t ask her, “Any word?” because before I could say anything, she said, “We got word.”

I looked at Ma, and Ma looked at me. I felt dizzy. I turned to Nora as she began to lift herself up and turn to face us. But this was not the Nora I knew. Nora usually moved quickly, in sharp bursts. She was intense. This Nora moved slowly, as if in a trance, as if she weighed several hundred pounds and had to use every ounce of energy to sit up.

She slid off the couch onto the floor and, seated cross-legged, began shuffling the papers on the floor back together.

“It’s not what we wanted,” she said.

Ma and I, as if on cue, slumped to the floor, too. The three of us sat there, a pile of papers in the middle like some kind of campfire. Nora took a deep breath and flipped through the papers. “The judge denied the motion,” she said. She found the page she was looking for and read, “‘Romero Taylor, through his appeals attorney, has not demonstrated that his first attorney rendered ineffective assistance of counsel during his first-degree murder trial. I hereby conclude there is no reason to warrant the grant of a new trial.’”

No one said a word for what seemed like a year.

Nora looked up.

“I’m sorry,” Nora said.

I had never seen Nora look like this — defeated. Ma put her head down, and I could tell she was trying to hold it together and not cry. I grabbed at the ruling. I was mad. “It doesn’t make sense, Nora!” I shouted. “It doesn’t make sense. What does the judge mean, ‘There is no reason to grant a new trial’? Nora, you gave him reasons, lots of reasons.”

“You’re right, Trell. We presented a lot of reasons why the judge should overturn your daddy’s conviction.”

I stood up. “There’s got to be something more we can do.”

“I’ve done as much as I can — as a lawyer, I mean. We filed an appeal, and the judge said no.”

Maybe it was because Nora saw how upset and angry I was, because she looked at me, and the regular look on her face began to return.

She said, “Because you’re not lawyers, the thing you two probably don’t realize is the way the legal system works: it almost always says no to people like us who think a jury was wrong. The legal system doesn’t want to look back at cases that are completed. It doesn’t want to reopen the past, because every day there are new crimes and new trials to deal with, and it needs to focus on new business if it hopes to stay afloat. That’s what we’re up against: a legal system that mainly wants to look ahead, not in the rearview mirror. It worships what it calls ‘finality.’”

Nora flipped through the judge’s ruling. “Here’s what I mean.” She cleared her throat, shook the paper so it was flat, and then read out loud in a deep voice to sound important, like a judge. “‘We can’t give new trials to everyone who establishes, after conviction, that they might be innocent. We would have no finality in the criminal justice system, and finality is important.’”

Nora looked up. “You follow this?” she asked.

“But it’s not fair,” I said. “Daddy’s trial was not fair.”

“I agree, Trell,” Nora said. “But what I’m saying is the system makes it really, really hard to reopen a finished case like your daddy’s. It wants finality.”

“There’s got to be something,” I insisted.

We sat there in silence for a few minutes. Then Nora slapped the floor and popped up. “Maybe there is something.”

I pulled Ma up.

Nora threw the judge’s ruling onto the table, as if she were done with it. “We are right — the case is rotten, even if the judge doesn’t agree. Maybe if we could get some help.”

“What kind of help?” Ma asked.

“The press,” Nora said. “We’ve been working pretty much on our own, in a vacuum. Basically, the only people who know about my motion are in this room, plus the judge. Of course, anybody can go to court and read the judge’s ruling. It’s a public record. But no one is doing that. No one is paying attention. Why? Because no one knows about it.”

She looked at us and smiled. “What if we changed that?”

“How?” I asked.

“What if we got a reporter interested? What if a reporter knew what we know about your daddy’s case — and what if the reporter was able to uncover some new evidence? What if the reporter wrote a story about this?”

I liked the idea.

“If people were to know what we know, that might put pressure on the police, the district attorney, the legal system — on all of them to take another look at the case. They might prefer finality, but with lots of publicity, they’d have to do something.”

“I like this idea,” I said, “a lot.”

“Easier said than done, though,” Nora said. “It’s not like I can call up a reporter and assign them a story about your daddy. I don’t even know any reporters. But before you got here, I did make one phone call. I called a friend, another lawyer, who’s mentioned in the newspapers all the time. I asked him if he could recommend someone good at digging into a case like ours.”

“What did he say?”

“Well, first things first. Before we go down this road, I need to know you two are okay with it.”

Ma was cool — anything to help Daddy, she said. Me too. I wasn’t afraid of the truth. The problem had been all the lies. People at the Weld or anywhere else knowing the truth, I had no problem with that.

I asked, “What’s the reporter’s name?”

“Clemens Bittner,” Nora said. “Works at the Boston Globe.”