Behold Casey Anthony. It’s 1:45 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon. Within the hour, she will know her fate. Will it be sweet freedom and a return to the dance clubs? Or a gray life behind bars, possibly awaiting death by needle or voltage?

They say she waited in a tiny cell, not much room to pace, not even a magazine to flip through. No chain smoking like an expectant father in a maternity ward, no soothing orange pills to calm the nerves. Just the accused, an expanse of time and a variety of heavy uncertainty most of us will never know.

The Anthony trial was huge. Television reporters came from all over. People bid for tickets just to be inside the courthouse. Afternoon soaps were interrupted by new developments. My own mother told me to hush for the first time in decades.

While Casey Anthony waited to hear her fate, the whole world waited with her. Maybe it provided some comfort in those final minutes, which must have felt both unreasonably fleeting and unimaginably long. Maybe it provided no comfort at all.

Americans in particular love a galvanizing trial. The delivery of a verdict is the Super Bowl, the Fourth of July and Christmas compacted into one super-dense moment that might last no more than 60 seconds. However long it takes for the jury foreman to announce the decision. It’s the kind of moment you remember your whole life.

“I was on the golf course, getting live feeds on the Droid.”

“I was at the meth clinic. Heard it from a cop.”

Huge. And while we all wait for it in our homes, offices and meth clinics, Casey Anthony has to sit quietly, hands folded neatly in lap, waiting for all the formalities that conclude a trial. Casey Anthony is waiting to hear if she will live or die and the judge drones on instructions to those in the courthouse. Court officials move at ordinary speed, which must seem super slow to the doomed one.

“Tell me!” she must want to scream, standing and flipping over the table in front of her. “Forget all of this tradition and tell me! Am I home at the end of the day? Or on a bus to the penitentiary?”

Nobody ever does that. How come?

I’m pretty sure I couldn’t sit there stone faced and stoic, waiting for 12 strangers to tell me whether the rest of my life will be free or caged. I’d chew my nails until they bled. I’d try to roll up and smoke a court document. I’d stand up and try to run in place. Court security guys love that.

But no. Every day, thousands of people sit and await judgment in just such a way. They don’t all draw the attention of CNN or make Nancy Grace wet herself with excitement, but they endure this kind of waiting hell, just the same. I covered trials for 15 years and never saw a defendant express anything more than subtle, nervous energy while sitting at the defense table.

I don’t know how they do it. I’m pretty sure Thorazine isn’t allowed in a courtroom, so how do you maintain composure when such a life-changing thing is about to come down?

So on Tuesday, in spite of the dazzling sun outside, I joined the rest of you vultures and waited for the reading of the verdict. I sat inside, my motorcycle sad and confused in the yard, and tolerated the shrill prognostication of overpaid TV news pundits.

I was waiting for the verdict like the rest of you. But mostly, I wanted to look into Casey Anthony’s eyes in those final seconds before her future was sealed. Those black, cold eyes that expressed very little during a month in which she was described as the fiend who killed her beautiful daughter and dumped her in a swamp.

Now it’s 2:15 p.m. The judge is warning the courtroom. Casey Anthony stands. She adjusts her shirt. She takes a breath. To me, she looks like a young lady waiting to hear whether or not she passed her license test.

She clasps her hands in front of her and sits when told to.

“Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”

They had. Casey opens her mouth briefly, like a fish gulping at a floating morsel, and then closes it again.

She waits. She stares straight ahead. There is a long — a very long moment of silence — while the judge looks over his documents.

“May the defendant please rise with counsel?”

Casey rises. The verdict is read. She is not guilty of first degree murder.

Casey sobs. She licks her lips. She’s not guilty of the next two charges, either. She draws a breath. Sobs again.

She’s guilty of providing false information to a cop. Big whoop. She can deal with that. She barely blinks. She looks neither pleased nor displeased. She looks sad and wrung out. She just got a gift and I suspect she knows it.

Half the world despises her and she may know that, as well. She’ll deal with it later. For now, freedom is so close, she must sense she can reach out and feel it for the first time in three years. She might be dancing again by the end of summer, and not with Yolanda, queen of cell block five.

I’m pretty sure that a hundred million people screamed, pounded their fists, swore, kicked stuff, high-fived complete strangers, perhaps even fainted when Casey Anthony was declared innocent of the most heinous stuff. My own momma probably swore for the first time since the incident in 1993.

But in the courthouse, it was complete order, as it usually is. Casey Anthony sat down and waited for the rest of the formalities to finish up. She didn’t whoop, pump her fists or spin a cartwheel. She waited, as she has done for so many months.

The American justice system, folks. You may not always like what it delivers, but you have to admit it does the job. Casey Anthony was found not guilty of doping her kid so she could go out and party. Not guilty of putting duct tape over the big-eyed girl’s mouth and nose until she was dead. Not guilty of hauling the remains around in her trunk before heaving them into a bog. Not guilty of all the stuff for which she is hated.

Mothers in particular are in a fury. They suffered and sacrificed to bring up their own children. They endured harsh mornings, terrifying illnesses and dreadful teen years but they did the job of parenting, hard as it was. To them, Casey Anthony is an ogre and an insult to mothers everywhere.

But it was a fair trial. If you’re one of the many enraged over the decision of the jury you just have to believe that justice will come.

In one form or another, there will be justice for Caylee Anthony.

You just have to wait for it. And then wait a little longer.