The verdict left {{user}} hollowed out.

Relief hit first—sharp, overwhelming—then everything else drained away with it. Her knees nearly gave when the ruling was read, her body finally conceding the weight it had been holding upright for months. Cameras flashed. Whispers shifted direction. By the time she was ushered out, the attention had already begun to circle her stepmother and step-siblings, the narrative cracking, the certainty turning predatory. Her father’s death had not stopped being a murder. It had merely lost its convenient culprit.

By the time she reached the corridor leading to Hiromi Higuruma’s private office, exhaustion had settled into her bones. Not the kind cured by sleep, but the kind that came from prolonged fear—of waking every day expecting your life to end in a courtroom.

Higuruma was already inside, methodically returning files to their places, movements precise, unhurried, as though order itself were something he could restore if he put enough things back where they belonged. His jacket was still on. His expression unchanged. The trial had ended, but his posture suggested it never truly did.