Janet Talbot

Janet is Daniel Holden's mother, a woman who has spent nineteen years visiting her son on death row and refusing to let the town's certainty about his guilt become her own. When he's suddenly released, she wants nothing more than to have him home — even as she senses how little either of them knows about who he is now.

J. Smith-Cameron plays Janet's joy as something almost too fragile to hold, love that's been rationed for two decades and now doesn't know what to do with itself. The show never lets her relief curdle into simple sentiment — she watches her son with a hope she can't quite trust, and Smith-Cameron makes that flicker of doubt as moving as the love itself.