The case review took four days.
Livia did not attend — she had no standing to attend — but Corvus sent a messenger after each session with a careful summary, and she read each one at her kitchen table with the focused attention of someone reading a text in a language she knows but is working to translate in real time.
Day one: procedural record examined. Three members of the original prosecution committee testified. Two contradicted each other on significant points regarding the evidence chain. The record showed two instances of documentation irregularity that required explanation.
Day two: Tullus testified. His testimony was composed and detailed and, in three specific places, demonstrably at odds with the documentary record. The presiding magistrate noted the discrepancies for the record.
Day three: the imperial administrative review of the evidence presented findings. Livia read this summary twice. The word "manipulated" appeared in the magistrate's own notes, which Corvus had included verbatim.
Day four: findings.
The messenger arrived in the late afternoon. Livia was in the garden when he came — she had given up pretending to do anything else that day and had simply been in the garden, with her mother's old gardening tools and the roses that were in their full late-summer extravagance. She stood up and took the sealed packet with her hands that were not quite steady and opened it.
Corvus had written the summary himself, in his old man's precise hand:
The review board has found, unanimously, that the original prosecution of Marcus Varro contained procedural violations of sufficient gravity to render the conviction unsafe. The conviction is overturned. The confiscation orders are invalidated. The matter of Senator Tullus's conduct during the original proceedings has been referred to the Senate ethics committee for formal examination.
Senator Marcus Varro is free to return to Rome, should he wish to do so.
She stood in the garden with the letter in her hands for a long time.
She did not cry immediately. The feeling was too large for crying immediately — it sat in her chest like something that needed to be breathed around slowly before it could be expressed as anything. She stood still and breathed and let it be as large as it was.
Then she went inside and wrote to her father.
She wrote three lines. She could not manage more.
Father. It is done. Come home.
She sealed it and gave it to the fastest messenger the household had.
Then she sat at her desk and let herself cry, which she did for approximately ten minutes with the efficient thoroughness of a woman who has been not-crying for three years and has some catching up to do. She was aware, even in the middle of it, of a quality of release she had not felt since before the disgrace — as though the specific shape of the grief she had been managing so carefully had dissolved, and the space it had occupied was now available for something else.
She washed her face. She went back to the garden.
Lucian arrived an hour later.
He came without announcement — which technically required the cooperation of her household, which had clearly decided to cooperate — and found her in the garden among the roses, still holding Corvus's letter.
He said nothing. He came and stood beside her and she showed him the letter and he read it and then he put his arm around her shoulders and she leaned against him, for the first time, simply and completely, without any of the careful distance she had been maintaining since the moonlit garden a summer ago.
They stood in the garden as the afternoon became evening and the roses went from gold to shadow around them, and it was the simplest and most enormous thing: two people standing together after a long time of not being able to.
"Your father," Lucian said finally.
"He's coming home." She felt the words in her chest. "He's coming home."
"Good." His arm tightened briefly. "That's good, Livia."
She looked up at him in the evening light.
"You said three weeks," she said.
"There's one week remaining."
"I know." She held his gaze. "I'm not waiting a week."
He looked at her for a long moment — the storm-brown eyes, the thin scar, the face she had memorized through months of letters and careful proximity — and then he said, quietly, with the directness that had always been his when he was being most himself:
"Livia Varro. Will you marry me?"
She had known the question was coming. She had known it for weeks. She had thought she would have something more complex to feel about it when it arrived.
Instead she felt the simplest thing: yes.
"Yes," she said.
The garden was quiet around them. The city hummed beyond the walls. The evening star appeared above the rooftops.
She had come home.