Claire Ashford

He can't remember committing murder. She's the only one who believes that should still matter. Mira Kessler expects one more forgettable afternoon finalizing paperwork for the mildest client of her career - a soft-spoken baker with no memory of who he used to be, and no reason to think his past will ever knock. Then a stranger tears through the courtroom doors and accuses him, in front of a judge, a clerk, and every camera in the room, of taking her brother's life.
Now Mira has three weeks to defend a man who cannot testify to his own innocence, against a senator determined to prove that no clean slate should ever erase a debt owed in blood - while the dead man's sister demands an answer nobody in that room is prepared to give her. As the clock counts down to a vote that could unmake thousands of erased lives overnight, Mira finds a single discrepancy buried so deep in a sealed file that the state itself tried to make it disappear before she could.
The closer she gets to the truth, the less certain she becomes about who deserves protecting, who deserves believing, and whether the law can tell the difference between a man who changed and a man who simply vanished. If the person everyone swears is dead was never gone at all - then who, exactly, is on trial for killing him?