I’ve been a judge for over twenty years, long enough to believe I understood the weight of a signature and the quiet power that came with a black robe. I had ruled on thousands of cases—foreclosures, custody disputes, criminal sentencing, injunctions that could change lives in ways I rarely saw firsthand. I told myself that distance was necessary, that impartiality required separation, and that the law worked best when emotion was kept in check.

Still, nothing in my career prepared me for what I witnessed the night I decided to observe my own eviction order being carried out. It was Christmas Eve, the kind of night when the world feels suspended between expectation and reflection, and I sat alone in my car across the street from St. Catherine’s Children’s Home. The building was old but well kept, its windows glowing softly with Christmas lights strung by volunteers who believed tradition could soften hardship. Inside were twenty-three children, all of them wards of the state, all of them about to be forced out because of a bank foreclosure I had approved weeks earlier.