Outside, a police cruiser rolled past the house for the third time that night. Faith pretended not to see it.
The morning of the hearing, Faith wore a navy dress and flat black shoes. She carried a manila folder containing the camera footage on a flash drive, a printed transcript, and three photographs of the intersection. Arriving forty minutes early at the Fulton County Municipal Courthouse, she sat on a wooden bench on the third floor and watched families drift past. Most of them looked like her. Most of them looked tired.
Hollister arrived fifteen minutes before the hearing. Seeing Faith, he walked straight toward her without slowing down. His shoulder deliberately slammed into hers as he passed.
The manila folder flew out of her hands. Papers scattered across the marble floor. The flash drive skittered under the bench.
Faith did not speak. She did not rise to anger. She lowered herself to one knee and began collecting her papers in silence, the way her mother had taught her to pick up broken glass without cutting herself.
Hollister stopped and turned back. He placed the polished toe of his black service boot directly on one of the intersection photographs, pressing down until the glossy paper wrinkled.
"Oops," he said, loud enough for the three strangers in the hallway to hear. "Probably doesn't matter anyway. Judges around here don't look too hard at evidence from folks like you."
A young Black father waiting with his son lowered his eyes. A courthouse janitor glanced up, then kept mopping. Nobody said anything. Faith continued picking up her papers, looking only at the scuff marks on the toe of Hollister's boot. She memorized them.
From the doorway of Courtroom 3B, a sixty-eight-year-old clerk named Coretta Banks watched the exchange. Coretta had worked in this building for thirty-one years and had seen Wade Hollister bully three different women in this exact hallway. Her eyes narrowed. She reached into her cardigan pocket and pressed a small button on her phone. She didn't know yet what she was recording. She only knew she was tired of watching.