language she used for every case that crossed her desk. She’d written hundreds of these reports over the years, always about someone else. It felt strange, writing one about herself. She kept catching herself trying to edit out the parts that made her sound less composed than she’d like to remember
being — the way her voice had shaken, just slightly, when the cuffs went on — before making herself put it back in. The truth mattered more than how it made her look.
Word moved fast through the department, the way it always does. By the second day, colleagues she barely knew were stopping by her desk to ask if it was true, if she’d really been the one in that dashcam video that people were already quietly passing around on their phones. Word moved faster still through
the district precinct where the two officers worked. Within a week, something else surfaced that nobody had expected — three other complaints, buried in old files, that had never been properly followed up.
