The case file that never closed

I found it today—three years old, a thin folder with no case number, just a name and a date. The client was a woman who’d been charged with possession after a routine traffic stop. I lost the motion to suppress; the evidence was technically admissible. She didn’t get prison, but she did lose her job, her apartment, her dignity. I’ve thought about her every few months since. The file sat in storage, unprocessed, untouched. Today I went through it again. Not to fix anything. Just to see what remained. There’s a coffee stain on the bottom corner. A note in pencil: ‘she said she only wanted to be