My bare feet, pale and scarred from months of un-steady walking, touched the cold granite floorboards of Courtroom 4B:
*tack.*
I stood up.
My spine was straight.
The postural ataxia was gone. The dizziness that had stolen my life for eleven months had been burned out of my synapses by forty milligrams of pure federal naloxone.
I walked three paces across the well of the court.
My hospital slippers made a clean, unhurried, rhythmic sound against the marble: *crunch… tack… crunch.*
I stopped two feet from where my husband lay pinned.
I did not slap his cheek.
I did not spit on his head.
I reached down to my left hand, took the three-carat platinum diamond engagement ring he had placed on my finger eight years ago at the Omaha Cathedral—the ring purchased with money stolen from my grandfather’s maritime dividend accounts—and slipped it smoothly off my knuckle:
