The man in the dock is almost two metres tall, has blue eyes and a gentle manner. His name is Andrea Rossi, he is the father of six children, he is an accountant and has inherited a prestigious firm. He is the last person one would expect to see on trial. Instead, this is how Gabriele Romagnoli sees him. She has not met him for some time, but knows him well, because as boys they were schoolmates, and friends. A monarchist in red Bologna, devoted to his family, a devotee of a formalism that often slips into snootiness, the holder of a polished eloquence and a thousand extravagant foibles, Rossi is the quintessence of the abyss that divides appearance from being. That's right, because behind the curtain of bourgeois respectability, with aristocratic aspirations, a hell of lies, bad investments and mounting debts is stirring. And now he is on trial for murder. The charge: having killed on a scorching summer afternoon in 2006 Vitalina Balani, a 70-year-old former nurse and wife of a wealthy real estate developer. Within a short time, Balani had lent Andrea two million euro. There would be a motive, then. And there are many clues. No irrefutable proof, however. But it is enough for the Prosecutor's Office to follow one track and Andrea Rossi to be sentenced to life imprisonment. Romagnoli returns to the city where he grew up to take ‘the big chill’ that accompanies the hour of reckoning, when we measure the distance separating what we wanted to be from what we have become. With the lucidity of the reporter, the depth of the writer and the humanity of the friend, he reconstructs a judicial affair with incredible implications, raises the ‘reasonable doubt’, dismantles the theorem hidden by definition in every circumstantial trial and appeals to the best lesson of garantism, because worse than a guilty man at large there is only an innocent man in jail. ‘Demand for Grace' is Emmanuel Carrère's “The Adversary” when the presumption of innocence still applies. Andrea Rossi was given a life sentence. To impose it one must be convinced (beyond reasonable doubt) that he killed with premeditation. On this, the clues have left more than one shadow. And shadows do not go to prison. People go there.