It's going to be all right

“It’s going to be all right” is the reassurance Howie Gold gives Terry Maitland as he is taken into custody, and its force lies in the gap between what the words promise and what follows. Terry carries them with him into a public ordeal; the narrator’s blunt reversal makes the phrase an emblem of comfort that cannot protect him from the consequences already gathering around him.

The Reassurance

After a new pair of handcuffs is snapped onto Terry’s wrists, he looks for Howie, anxious in a way the narration compares to a child whose mother has let go of his hand on the first day of kindergarten. Howie leaves a cell-phone call and hurries over. Although an officer tells him not to touch the prisoner, Gold ignores the warning, puts an arm around Terry’s shoulders, and murmurs the reassurance. He then surprises both himself and his client by kissing Terry on the cheek.

The gesture makes the words more than a lawyer’s routine encouragement. In a scene defined by custody and separation, Gold offers physical closeness as well as speech: a hand around the shoulders, a kiss, and a promise of safety. Terry accepts the reassurance at the moment when the officers are about to escort him away.

Carried into Public View

Terry takes Gold’s words with him down the front steps, where a county van waits behind a State Police cruiser with its lights pulsing. Cameras flash and television lights come on as questions are thrown at him about whether he has been charged, whether he did it, whether he is innocent or has confessed, and what he can say to Frank Peterson’s parents. The rapid-fire interrogation turns his removal into a public spectacle, leaving little room for the private consolation Gold has just offered.

The phrase persists in Terry’s mind amid the cameras and questions. The contrast is sharp: Gold’s words suggest that events can still be made safe, while the scene around Terry displays his helplessness before police custody, public judgment, and the demands of the press. His attachment to the reassurance shows how urgently he needs to believe it, not that the promise has any power to change what is happening.

Reversal and Irony

The narration confirms that Terry hangs onto the words, especially the assurance that everything will be all right. It then breaks the promise with a short, unambiguous reversal: “But of course it wasn’t.” The reassurance’s meaning is thus fixed retrospectively by its failure. What Gold intends as comfort becomes a painful measure of the distance between humane intention and outcome.

That reversal also gives the expression its larger narrative significance. The kiss and the promise briefly affirm loyalty and care at the very moment Terry is being taken away; the immediate exposure to cameras, accusations, and the waiting van makes clear that affection cannot shield him from the forces bearing down on him. The words remain with Terry, but the narrator’s final judgment denies them the status of prophecy: they offer hope, not protection.