The woman across from Fara had completed every required stage of the forgiveness proceeding. The documentation was thorough: six years of supervised sessions, three independent assessments, the mandatory reconciliation dialogue. The file was the cleanest Fara had reviewed in nineteen years.
The woman's son had died when a safety system failed. The man responsible for the safety system was present at the opposite end of the room, in a chair he had been sitting in for most of six years. He was sixty-one. He had followed the proceedings requirements exactly. He had completed his own required stages. He did not look well.
Fara asked the standard questions. She had asked them thousands of times. She watched the woman's face, her hands, the particular quality of her stillness. She had developed, over nineteen years, a sensitivity to the difference between compliance and resolution, between exhaustion and release, between someone performing the end of something and someone who had actually arrived at it.
This woman had arrived somewhere. Fara could see it. She could not verify what it was.
This was the problem that nineteen years had not solved. Fara could see when something changed in a person's relationship to a harm they had suffered. She could not certify that what changed was forgiveness. She did not know, from the outside, what forgiveness was. She was not sure she knew from the inside. She had worked in this court for nineteen years and had never once, in signing a certification, been certain.
She signed the certification. She always signed the certification eventually. The alternative was leaving people in a proceeding indefinitely.
The woman thanked her. The man in the chair did not look up.
Fara went back to her office and wrote in her notes: genuine arrival at something. Unable to confirm nature of something.
She had several variations of this note. They were all she had, after nineteen years, to show for what she actually knew.