Night is always hard, especially the ones where she tosses and turns on the bed, waiting for the night to pass. The pale, faded light of dawn is the guest that has yet to arrive, for whom there is nothing to do but wait. Such nights are a familiar friend to Lavinia. What awaits after an exhausting day is yet another exhausting day, filled with pretentious defending counsels, arrogant famiglia and silent judges. The sound of the gavel echoes through the court, yet it is no different from a fairground game, except worse, because at least in a fairground the hammer whacks the mole. When tormented by such cruel nights, Lavinia pulls out the creased letter from the bottom of her drawer. She remembers finding it under her windscreen wipers; such letters were usually threats and warnings, but this was an exception. It is a short letter, scribbled down hastily, reproaching Lavinia for pronouncing innocent a defendant that the famiglia had sent into the courthouse to take the fall. The letter wrote that Lavinia's 'self-righteous' judgment had done more harm than good, a complaint that she had seen many times: The small attempts of the judges to do the right thing are often futile, any small justice achieved in the courthouse quickly swallowed by the dark night outside. Yet the writer, after what seemed to be a long struggle with himself, left this line at the end: 'No one cares, but at least there was one person who said I was innocent. Thanks.' Lavinia has tried to deduce whom the writer of this unusual letter was, which is akin to trying to find a needle in a haystack. There have been so many, people whom she knew were innocent, whom she pronounced innocent, but what of it? As the writer of the letter said: No one cares. Lavinia never stopped searching. Perhaps she wanted to tell the writer face-to-face, that justice would never be alone and fleeting, as long as she was there, that justice would come at the gavel's drop, as the dawn breaks the night. That is, until she found the coroner's autopsy report on her desk. The cause of death was suicide. If this was the end that Siracusa had for its judges, then what was the point of the justice that she sought? A creased letter, a word of thanks. However insignificant it was, even if it could not light her desk like a lamp, perhaps there was someone who felt that she was the only defender of justice, then and there. And so, she never gave up, even if she fights a lonely battle. If she gives up, there will be no one left to fight it; if she kept silent, there will be no one to speak up. There are two ways to live with the night before the dawn. Allow it to consume oneself, until one does not feel it, or search for what should not be consumed by it, and keep those things safe. The one thing that must not be surrendered is the right to define the light.