1) Fiona breaks her professional rules and decides to meet Adam because she considers the elements about Adam’s case insufficient to take a decision. Indeed while in the courtroom, Fiona listens to the hospital’s barrister’s and Leslie Grieve’s argumentations and Tovey’s neutral considerations about the case and she finds out that the uniqueness of the situation doesn’t allow her to take a decision. Fiona’s awareness of the unconventionality of her decision of meeting Adam is explained by the narrator through the sentence “He should know that he is not in the hands of an impersonal bureaucracy”; the statement highlights Fiona’s involvement in juxtaposition with the common code of behavior of a Judge, who should be as rational and impartial as possible.  

2) The meeting between Adam and Fiona can be arranged into two different sequences. In the first sequence, Adam moves from being curious to know her, to feeling annoyed because of Fiona’s way of putting into question all his beliefs. The turning point is marked by Fiona’s interest in knowing more about Adam’s poetry: from this point the “mood in the room” changes; Adam unveils his deep interest in Fiona as a High Court Judge and, at the same time, as a person who loves art (Adam is struck both on the public and the private level). The boy starts to admire her (for example he call her ‘My Lady’ as if she was in the courtroom), and his interest in her will grow higher and higher. Considering the whole novel, Adam’s interest in Fiona will record its peak after Fiona final judgment that will be a revelation for the boy, who will re-consider all his beliefs (so Fiona seems to be a life-change figure for him).

3) At the end of Fiona and Adam’s last meeting, she decided to kiss him on the cheek. Probably, in Fiona’s mind a kiss will let her obtain pardon for her decision to negate Adam’s request to live with her and her husband and it will also clarify her decision to distance herself from the boy, since the legal cause has already been closed and she doesn’t want to get more and more involved.