The Holdout

by Graham Moore

She was nostalgic for an imaginary future.

“Agatha Christie,” he said. “All of them.” “I remember you reading those, when we were sequestered.” “I can’t read them anymore.” “Okay.” “I think I figured out why.” He took a breath. “In the stories, there’s always an answer at the end. Resolution. The detective confronts the killer; the killer admits it. We know for sure. But out here—it’s not like that. Out here, maybe somebody goes to jail. Maybe somebody doesn’t. But we never know the truth. The real, whole, definite truth. It’s impossible.”

In courtrooms all across this city, Maya had seen people get verdicts they’d wanted, and she’d seen just as many get ones they didn’t. But the verdicts had nothing to do with truth. No verdict ever changed a person’s opinion. Juries weren’t gods. The people who went into those courtrooms looking for divine revelation came out bearing the fruits of bureaucratic negotiation.

She wanted to say that the only thing worse than being wrong was having a bottomless need to prove that you never were.

She’d gone on and on about the “cycles of violence” in which Maya’s client had been both victim and perpetrator. The woman made them sound like ocean tides: as inescapable as the gravitational pull of the full moon. To Maya, “cycles” sounded too much like just deserts. She did not believe in karma. To her, violence was a sickness, a contagion. Everyone who came into contact with it became a carrier. Its survivors, its bystanders, all served to bring more violence into the world.

Maya had no more sympathy for supposedly “good” people whose decisions had led, time and time again, to the misery of others.

At least one new life was created in between the litany of deaths.

There was a quantity of lies between child and parent that was acceptable—that had been in some way mutually agreed upon in the contract between them—and this, blessed miracle that it was, fit safely onto the pile.

Just two innocent strangers in a guilty crowd.