By the time you read this, I hope to be dead.

You can’t undo something that’s happened; you can’t take back a word that’s already been said out loud. You’ll think about me and wish that you had been able to talk me out of this. You’ll try to figure out what would have been the one right thing to say, to do. I guess I should tell you, Don’t blame yourself; this isn’t your fault, but that would be a lie. We both know that I didn’t get here by myself.

You’ll cry, at my funeral. You’ll say it didn’t have to be this way. You will act like everyone expects you to. But will you miss me?

More importantly-will I miss you?

Does either one of us really want to hear the answer to that question?

March 6, 2007

In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn, color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five.

Nineteen minutes is how long it took the Tennessee Titans to sell out of tickets to the play-offs. It’s the length of a sitcom, minus the commercials. It’s the driving distance from the Vermont border to the town of Sterling, New Hampshire.

In nineteen minutes, you can order a pizza and get it delivered. You can read a story to a child or have your oil changed. You can walk a mile. You can sew a hem.

In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world, or you can just jump off it.

In nineteen minutes, you can get revenge.

As usual, Alex Cormier was running late. It took thirty-two minutes to drive from her house in Sterling to the superior court in Grafton County, New Hampshire, and that was only if she speeded through Orford. She hurried downstairs in her stockings, carrying her heels and the files she’d brought home with her over the weekend. She twisted her thick copper hair into a knot and anchored it at the base of her neck with bobby pins, transforming herself into the person she needed to be before she left her house.

Alex had been a superior court judge now for thirty-four days. She’d believed that, having proved her mettle as a district court judge for the past five years, this time around the appointment might be easier. But at forty, she was still the youngest judge in the state. She still had to fight to establish herself as a fair justice-her history as a public defender preceded her into her courtroom, and prosecutors assumed she’d side with the defense. When Alex had submitted her name years ago for the bench, it had been with the sincere desire to make sure people in this legal system were innocent until proven guilty. She just never anticipated that, as a judge, she might not be given the same benefit of the doubt.

The smell of freshly brewed coffee drew Alex into the kitchen. Her daughter was hunched over a steaming mug at the kitchen table, poring over a textbook. Josie looked exhausted-her blue eyes were bloodshot; her chestnut hair was a knotty ponytail. “Tell me you haven’t been up all night,” Alex said.

Josie didn’t even glance up. “I haven’t been up all night,” she parroted.

Alex poured herself a cup of coffee and slid into the chair across from her. “Honestly?”

“You asked me to tell you something,” Josie said. “You didn’t ask for the truth.”

Alex frowned. “You shouldn’t be drinking coffee.”

“And you shouldn’t be smoking cigarettes.”

Alex felt her face heat up. “I don’t-”

“Mom,” Josie sighed, “even when you open up the bathroom windows, I can still smell it on the towels.” She glanced up, daring Alex to challenge her other vices.

Alex herself didn’t have any other vices. She didn’t have time for any vices. She would have liked to say that she knew with authority that Josie didn’t have any vices, either, but she would only be making the same inference the rest of the world did when they met Josie: a pretty, popular, straight-A student who knew better than most the consequences of falling off the straight-and-narrow. A girl who was destined for great things. A young woman who was exactly what Alex had hoped her daughter would grow to become.

Josie had once been so proud to have a mother as a judge. Alex could remember Josie broadcasting her career to the tellers at the bank, the baggers in the grocery store, the flight attendants on planes. She’d ask Alex about her cases and her decisions. That had all changed three years ago, when Josie entered high school, and the tunnel of communication between them slowly bricked shut. Alex didn’t necessarily think that Josie was hiding anything more than any other teenager, but it was different: a normal parent might metaphorically judge her child’s friends, whereas Alex could do it legally.

“What’s on the docket today?” Alex said.

“Unit test. What about you?”

“Arraignments,” Alex replied. She squinted across the table, trying to read Josie’s textbook upside down. “Chemistry?”

“Catalysts.” Josie rubbed her temples. “Substances that speed up a reaction, but stay unchanged by it. Like if you’ve got carbon monoxide gas and hydrogen gas and you toss in zinc and chromium oxide, and…what’s the matter?”

“Just having a little flashback of why I got a C in Orgo. Have you had breakfast?”

“Coffee,” Josie said.

“Coffee doesn’t count.”

“It does when you’re in a rush,” Josie pointed out.

Alex weighed the costs of being even five minutes later, or getting another black mark against her in the cosmic good-parenting tally. Shouldn’t a seventeen-year-old be able to take care of herself in the morning? Alex started pulling items out of the refrigerator: eggs, milk, bacon. “I once presided over an involuntary emergency admission at the state mental hospital for a woman who thought she was Emeril. Her husband had her committed when she put a pound of bacon in the blender and chased him around the kitchen with a knife, yelling Bam!”

Josie glanced up from her textbook. “For real?”

“Oh, believe me, I can’t make these things up.” Alex cracked an egg into a skillet. “When I asked her why she’d put a pound of bacon in the blender, she looked at me and said that she and I must just cook differently.”

Josie stood up and leaned against the counter, watching her mother cook. Domesticity wasn’t Alex’s strong point-she didn’t know how to make a pot roast but was proud to have memorized the phone numbers of every pizza place and Chinese restaurant in Sterling that offered free delivery. “Relax,” Alex said dryly. “I think I can do this without setting the house on fire.”

But Josie took the skillet out of her hands and laid the strips of bacon in it, like sailors bunking tightly together. “How come you dress like that?” she asked.

Alex glanced down at her skirt, blouse, and heels and frowned. “Why? Is it too Margaret Thatcher?”

“No, I mean…why do you bother? No one knows what you have on under your robe. You could wear, like, pajama pants. Or that sweater you have from college that’s got holes in the elbows.”

“Whether or not people see it, I’m still expected to dress…well, judiciously.”

A cloud passed over Josie’s face, and she busied herself over the stove, as if Alex had somehow given the wrong answer. Alex stared at her daughter-the bitten half-moon fingernails, the freckle behind her ear, the zigzag part in her hair-and saw instead the toddler who’d wait at the babysitter’s window at sundown, because she knew that was when Alex came to get her. “I’ve never worn pajamas to work,” Alex admitted, “but I do sometimes close the door to chambers and take a nap on the floor.”

A slow, surprised smile played over Josie’s face. She held her mother’s admission as if it were a butterfly lighting on her hand by accident: an event so startling you could not call attention to it without risking its loss. But there were miles to drive and defendants to arraign and chemical equations to interpret, and by the time Josie had set the bacon to drain on a pad of paper toweling, the moment had winged away.

“I still don’t get why I have to eat breakfast if you don’t,” Josie muttered.

“Because you have to be a certain age to earn the right to ruin your own life.” Alex pointed at the scrambled eggs Josie was mixing in the skillet. “Promise me you’ll finish that?”

Josie met her gaze. “Promise.”

“Then I’m headed out.”

Alex grabbed her travel mug of coffee. By the time she backed her car out of the garage, her head was already focused on the decision she had to write that afternoon; the number of arraignments the clerk would have stuffed onto her docket; the motions that would have fallen like shadows across her desk between Friday afternoon and this morning. She was caught up in a world far away from home, where at that very moment her daughter scraped the scrambled eggs from the skillet into the trash can without ever taking a single bite.

Sometimes Josie thought of her life as a room with no doors and no windows. It was a sumptuous room, sure-a room half the kids in Sterling High would have given their right arm to enter-but it was also a room from which there really wasn’t an escape. Either Josie was someone she didn’t want to be, or she was someone who nobody wanted.

She lifted her face to the spray of the shower-water she’d made so hot it raised red welts, stole breath, steamed windows. She counted to ten, and then finally ducked away from the stream to stand naked and dripping in front of the mirror. Her face was swollen and scarlet; her hair stuck to her shoulders in thick ropes. She turned sideways, scrutinized her flat belly, and sucked it in a little. She knew what Matt saw when he looked at her, what Courtney and Maddie and Brady and Haley and Drew all saw-she just wished that she could see it, too. The problem was, when Josie looked in the mirror, she noticed what was underneath that raw skin, instead of what had been painted upon it.

She understood how she was supposed to look and supposed to act. She wore her dark hair long and straight; she dressed in Abercrombie & Fitch; she listened to Dashboard Confessional and Death Cab for Cutie. She liked feeling the eyes of other girls in the school when she sat in the cafeteria borrowing Courtney’s makeup. She liked the way teachers already knew her name on the first day of class. She liked having guys stare at her when she walked down the hall with Matt’s arm around her.

But there was a part of her that wondered what would happen if she let them all in on the secret-that some mornings, it was hard to get out of bed and put on someone else’s smile; that she was standing on air, a fake who laughed at all the right jokes and whispered all the right gossip and attracted the right guy, a fake who had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be real…and who, when you got right down to it, didn’t want to remember, because it hurt even more than this.

There wasn’t anyone to talk to. If you even doubted your right to be one of the privileged, popular set, then you didn’t belong there. And Matt-well, he’d fallen for the Josie on the surface, like everyone else. In fairy tales, when the mask came off, the handsome prince still loved the girl, no matter what-and that alone would turn her into a princess. But high school didn’t work that way. What made her a princess was hooking up with Matt. And in some weird circular logic, what made Matt hook up with her was the very fact that she was one of Sterling High’s princesses.

She couldn’t confide in her mother, either. You don’t stop being a judge just because you step out of the courthouse, her mother used to say. It was why Alex Cormier never drank more than one glass of wine in public; it was why she never yelled or cried. A trial was a stupid word, considering that an attempt was never good enough: you were supposed to toe the line, period. Many of the accomplishments that Josie’s mother was most proud of-Josie’s grades, her looks, her acceptance into the “right” crowd-had not been achieved because Josie wanted them so badly herself, but mostly because she was afraid of falling short of perfect.

Josie wrapped a towel around herself and headed into her bedroom. She pulled a pair of jeans out of her closet and then layered two long-sleeved tees that showed off her chest. She glanced at her clock-if she wasn’t going to be late, she’d have to get moving.

Before leaving her room, though, she hesitated. She sank down onto her bed and rummaged underneath the nightstand for the Ziploc sandwich bag that she’d tacked to the wooden frame. Inside was a stash of Ambien-pirated one pill at a time from her mother’s prescription for insomnia, so she’d never notice. It had taken Josie nearly six months to inconspicuously gather only fifteen pills, but she figured if she washed them down with a fifth of vodka, it would do the trick. It wasn’t like she had a strategy, really, to kill herself next Tuesday, or when the snow melted, or anything concrete like that. It was more like a backup plan: When the truth came out, and no one wanted to be around her anymore, it stood to reason Josie wouldn’t want to be around herself either.

She tacked the pills back beneath her nightstand and headed downstairs. As she walked into the kitchen to load up her backpack, she found her chemistry textbook still wide open-and a long-stemmed red rose marking her place.

Matt was leaning against the refrigerator in the corner; he must have let himself in through the open garage door. Like always, he made her head swim with seasons-his hair was all the colors of autumn; his eyes the bright blue of a winter sky; his smile as wide as any summer sun. He was wearing a baseball hat backward, and a Sterling Varsity Hockey tee over a thermal shirt that Josie had once stolen for a full month and hidden in her underwear drawer, so that when she needed to she could breathe in the scent of him. “Are you still pissed off?” he asked.

Josie hesitated. “I wasn’t the one who was mad.”

Matt pushed away from the refrigerator, coming forward until he could link his arms around Josie’s waist. “You know I can’t help it.”

A dimple blossomed in his right cheek; Josie could already feel herself softening. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see you. I really did have to study.”

Matt pushed her hair off her face and kissed her. This was exactly why she’d told him not to come over last night-when she was with him, she felt herself evaporating. Sometimes, when he touched her, Josie imagined herself vanishing in a puff of steam.

He tasted of maple syrup, of apologies. “It’s all your fault, you know,” he said. “I wouldn’t act as crazy if I didn’t love you so much.”

At that moment, Josie could not remember the pills she was hoarding in her room; she could not remember crying in the shower; she could not remember anything but what it felt like to be adored. I’m lucky, she told herself, the word streaming like a silver ribbon through her mind. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

Patrick Ducharme, the sole detective on the Sterling police force, sat on a bench on the far side of the locker room, listening to the patrol officers on the morning shift pick on a rookie with a little extra padding around the middle. “Hey, Fisher,” Eddie Odenkirk said, “are you the one who’s having the baby, or is it your wife?”

As the rest of the guys laughed, Patrick took pity on the kid. “It’s early, Eddie,” he said. “Can’t you at least wait to start in until we’ve all had a cup of coffee?”

“I would, Captain,” Eddie laughed, “but it looks like Fisher already ate all the donuts and-what the hell is that?”

Patrick followed Eddie’s gaze downward, to his own feet. He did not, as a matter of course, change in the locker room with the patrol officers, but he’d jogged to the station this morning instead of driving, to work off too much good cooking consumed over the weekend. He’d spent Saturday and Sunday in Maine with the girl who currently held his heart-his goddaughter, a five-and-a-half-year-old named Tara Frost. Her mother, Nina, was Patrick’s oldest friend, and the one love he probably would never get over, although she managed to be doing quite well without him. Over the course of the weekend, Patrick had deliberately lost ten thousand games of Candy Land, had given countless piggyback rides, had had his hair done, and-here was his cardinal mistake-had allowed Tara to put bright pink nail polish on his toes, which Patrick had forgotten to remove.

He glanced down at his feet and curled his toes under. “Chicks think it’s hot,” he said gruffly, as the seven men in the locker room struggled not to snicker at someone who was technically their superior. Patrick yanked his dress socks on, slipped into his loafers, and walked out, still holding his tie. One, he counted. Two, three. On cue, laughter spilled out of the locker room, following him down the hallway.

In his office, Patrick closed the door and peered at himself in the tiny mirror on the back. His black hair was still damp from his shower; his face was flushed from his run. He shimmied the knot of his tie up his neck, fashioning the noose, and then sat down at his desk.

Seventy-two emails had come in over the weekend-and usually anything more than fifty meant he wouldn’t get home before 8:00 p.m. all week. He began to weed through them, adding notes to a devil’s To Do list-one that never got any shorter, no matter how hard he worked.

Today, Patrick had to drive drugs down to the state lab-not a big deal, except that it was a four-hour block of his day that vanished right there. He had a rape case coming to fruition, the perp identified from a college face book and his statements transcribed and ready for the AG’s office. He had a cell phone that had been nabbed out of a car by a homeless guy. He had blood results come back from the lab as a match for a break-in at a jewelry store, and a suppression hearing in superior court, and already on his desk was the first new complaint of the day-a theft of wallets in which the credit cards had been used, leaving a trail for Patrick to trace.

Being a small-town detective required Patrick to be firing on all cylinders, all the time. Unlike cops he knew who worked for city departments, where they had twenty-four hours to solve a case before it was considered cold, Patrick’s job was to take everything that came across his desk-not to cherry-pick for the interesting ones. It was hard to get excited about a bad check case, or a theft that would net the perp a $200 fine when it cost the taxpayers five times that to have Patrick focus on it for a week. But every time he started thinking that his cases weren’t particularly important, he’d find himself face-to-face with a victim: the hysterical mother whose wallet had been stolen; the mom-and-pop jewelry store owners who’d been robbed of their retirement income; the rattled professor who was a victim of identity theft. Hope, Patrick knew, was the exact measure of distance between himself and the person who’d come for help. If Patrick didn’t get involved, if he didn’t give a hundred percent, then that victim was going to be a victim forever-which was why, since Patrick had joined the Sterling police, he had managed to solve every single case.

And yet.

When Patrick was lying in his bed alone and letting his mind sew a seam across the hem of his life, he did not remember the proven successes-only the potential failures. When he walked around the perimeter of a vandalized barn or found the stolen car stripped down and dumped in the woods or handed the tissue to the sobbing girl who’d been date-raped, Patrick couldn’t help but feel that he was too late. He was a detective, but he didn’t detect anything. It fell into his lap, already broken, every time.

It was the first warm day of March, the one where you started to believe that the snow would melt sooner rather than later, and that June was truly just around the corner. Josie sat on the hood of Matt’s Saab in the student parking lot, thinking that it was closer to summer than it was to the start of this school year, that in a scant three months, she would officially be a member of the senior class.

Beside her, Matt leaned against the windshield, his face tipped up to the sun. “Let’s ditch school,” he said. “It’s too nice out to be stuck inside all day.”

“If you ditch, you’ll be benched.”

The state championship tournament in hockey began this afternoon, and Matt played right wing. Sterling had won last year, and they had every expectation of doing it again. “You’re coming to the game,” Matt said, and it wasn’t a question, but a statement.

“Are you going to score?”

Matt smiled wickedly and tugged her on top of him. “Don’t I always?” he said, but he wasn’t talking about hockey anymore, and she felt a blush rise over the collar of her scarf.

Suddenly Josie felt a rain of hail on her back. They both sat up to find Brady Pryce, a football player, walking by hand-in-hand with Haley Weaver, the homecoming queen. Haley tossed a second shower of pennies-Sterling High’s way of wishing an athlete good luck. “Kick ass today, Royston,” Brady called.

Their math teacher was crossing the parking lot, too, with a worn black leather briefcase and a thermos of coffee. “Hey, Mr. McCabe,” Matt called out. “How’d I do on last Friday’s test?”

“Luckily, you’ve got other talents to fall back on, Mr. Royston,” the teacher said as he reached into his pocket. He winked at Josie as he pitched the coins, pennies that fell from the sky onto her shoulders like confetti, like stars coming loose.

It figures, Alex thought as she stuffed the contents of her purse back inside. She had switched handbags and left her pass key at home, which allowed her into the employee entrance at the rear of the superior court. Although she’d pushed the buzzer a million times, no one seemed to be around to let her in.

“Goddamn,” she muttered under her breath, hiking around the slush puddles so that her alligator heels wouldn’t get ruined-one of the perks of parking in the back was not having to do this. She could cut through the clerk’s office to her chambers, and if the planets were aligned, maybe even onto the bench without causing a delay in the docket.

Although the public entrance of the court had a line twenty people long, the court officers recognized Alex because, unlike the district court circuit, where you bounced from courthouse to courthouse, she would be ensconced here for six months. The officers waved her to the front of the line, but since she was carrying keys and a stainless steel travel thermos and God only knew what else in her purse, she set off the metal detectors.

The alarm was a spotlight; every eye in the lobby turned to see who’d gotten caught. Ducking her head, Alex hurried across the polished tile floor and nearly lost her footing. As she pitched forward, a squat man reached forward to steady her. “Hey, baby,” he said, leering. “I like your shoes.”

Without responding, Alex yanked herself out of his grasp and headed toward the clerk’s office. None of the other superior court judges had to deal with this. Judge Wagner was a nice guy, but with a face that looked like a pumpkin left to rot after Halloween. Judge Gerhardt-a fellow female-had blouses that were older than Alex. When Alex had first come to the bench, she’d thought that being a relatively young, moderately attractive woman was a good thing-a vote against typecasting-but on mornings like this, she wasn’t so sure.

She dumped her purse in chambers, shrugged into her robe, and took five minutes to drink her coffee and review the docket. Each case got its own file, but cases for repeat offenders were rubber-banded together, and sometimes judges wrote Post-it notes to each other inside about the case. Alex opened one and saw a picture of a stick-figure man with bars in front of his face-a signal from Judge Gerhardt that this was the offender’s last chance, and that next time, he should go to jail.

She rang the buzzer to signify to the court officer that she was ready to start, and waited to hear her cue: “All rise, the Honorable Alexandra Cormier presiding.” Walking into a courtroom, to Alex, always felt as if she were stepping onto a stage for the first time at a Broadway opening. You knew there would be people there, you knew their gazes would all be focused on you, but that didn’t prevent you from having a moment when you could not breathe, could not believe you were the one they had come to see.

Alex moved briskly behind the bench and sat down. There were seventy arraignments scheduled for that morning, and the courtroom was packed. The first defendant was called, and he shuffled past the bar with his eyes averted.

“Mr. O’Reilly,” Alex said, and as the man met her gaze she recognized him as the guy from the lobby. He was clearly uncomfortable, now that he realized whom he’d been flirting with. “You’re the gentleman who assisted me earlier, aren’t you?”

He swallowed. “Yes, Your Honor.”

“If you’d known I was the judge, Mr. O’Reilly, would you have said, ‘Hey, baby, I like your shoes’?”

The defendant glanced down, weighing impropriety against honesty. “I guess so, Your Honor,” he said after a moment. “Those are great shoes.”

The entire courtroom went still, anticipating her reaction. Alex smiled broadly. “Mr. O’Reilly,” she said, “I couldn’t agree more.”

Lacy Houghton leaned over the bed railing and put her face right in front of her sobbing patient’s. “You can do this,” she said firmly. “You can do this, and you will.”

After sixteen hours of labor, they were all exhausted-Lacy, the patient, and the father-to-be, who was facing zero-hour with the dawning realization that he was superfluous, that right now, his wife wanted her midwife much more than she wanted him. “I want you to get behind Janine,” Lacy told him, “and brace her back. Janine, I want you to look at me and give me another good push…”

The woman gritted her teeth and bore down, losing all sense of herself in the effort to create someone else. Lacy reached down to feel the baby’s head, to guide it past the seal of skin and quickly loop the cord over its head without ever losing eye contact with her patient. “For the next twenty seconds, your baby is going to be the newest person on this planet,” Lacy said. “Would you like to meet her?”

The answer was a pressured push. A crest of intention, a roar of purpose, a sluice of slick, purpled body that Lacy quickly lifted into the mother’s arms, so that when the infant cried for the first time in this life, she would already be in a position to be comforted.

Her patient started weeping again-tears had a whole different melody, didn’t they, without the pain threaded through them? The new parents bent over their baby, a closed circle. Lacy stepped back and watched. There was plenty of work left for a midwife to do even after the moment of birth, but for right now, she wanted to make eye contact with this little being. Where parents would notice a chin that looked like Aunt Marge’s or a nose that resembled Grandpa’s, Lacy would see instead a gaze wide with wisdom and peace-eight pounds of unadulterated possibility. Newborns reminded her of tiny Buddhas, faces full of divinity. It didn’t last long, though. When Lacy saw these same infants a week later at their regular checkups, they had turned into ordinary-albeit tiny-people. That holiness, somehow, disappeared, and Lacy was always left wondering where in this world it might go.

While his mother was across town delivering the newest resident of Sterling, New Hampshire, Peter Houghton was waking up. His father knocked on the door on his way out to work-Peter’s alarm clock. Downstairs, a bowl and a box of cereal would be waiting for him-his mother remembered to do that even when she got paged at two in the morning. There would be a note from her, too, telling him to have a good day at school, as if it were that simple.

Peter threw back his covers. He moved to his desk, still wearing his pajama bottoms, sat down, and logged onto the Internet.

The words on the message board were blurry. He reached for his glasses-he kept them next to his computer. After he slipped the frames on, he dropped the case onto the keyboard-and suddenly, he was seeing something he’d hoped never to see again.

Peter reached out and hit CONTROL ALT DELETE, but he could still picture it, even after the screen went blank, even after he closed his eyes, even after he started to cry.

In a town the size of Sterling, everyone knew everyone else, and always had. In some ways, this was comforting-like a great big extended family that you sometimes loved and sometimes fell out of favor with. At other times, it haunted Josie: like right now, when she was standing in the cafeteria line behind Natalie Zlenko, a dyke of the first order who, way back in second grade, had invited Josie over to play and had convinced her to pee on the front lawn like a boy. What were you thinking, her mother had said, when she’d come to pick her up and saw them bare-bottomed and squatting over the daffodils. Even now, a decade later, Josie couldn’t look at Natalie Zlenko with her buzz cut and her ever-present SLR camera without wondering if Natalie still thought about that, too.

On Josie’s other side was Courtney Ignatio, the alpha female of Sterling High. With her honey-blond hair hanging over her shoulders like a shawl made of silk and her low-rise jeans mail-ordered from Fred Segal, she’d spawned an entourage of clones. On Courtney’s tray was a bottle of water and a banana. On Josie’s was a platter of French fries. It was second period, and just like her mother had predicted, she was famished.

“Hey,” Courtney said, loud enough for Natalie to overhear. “Can you tell the vagitarian to let us pass?”

Natalie’s cheeks burned with color, and she flattened herself up against the sneeze guard of the salad bar so that Courtney and Josie could slip by. They paid for their food and walked across the cafeteria.

Whenever she came into the cafeteria, Josie felt like a naturalist observing different species in their natural, nonacademic habitat. There were the geeks, bent over their textbooks and laughing at math jokes nobody else even wanted to understand. Behind them were the art freaks, who smoked clove cigarettes on the ropes course behind the school and drew manga comics in the margins of their notes. Near the condiment bar were the skanks, who drank black coffee and waited for the bus that would take them to the technical high school three towns over for their afternoon classes; and the druggies, already strung out by nine o’clock in the morning. There were misfits, too-kids like Natalie and Angela Phlug, fringe friends by default, because nobody else would have them.

And then there was Josie’s posse. They took over two tables, not because there were so many of them, but because they were larger than life: Emma, Maddie, Haley, John, Brady, Trey, Drew. Josie could remember how, when she started hanging around with this group, she’d get everyone’s names confused. They were that interchangeable.

They all sort of looked alike, too-the boys all wearing their maroon home hockey jerseys and their hats backward, bright thatches of hair stuck through the loops at their foreheads like the start of a fire; the girls carbon copies of Courtney, by studious design. Josie slipped inconspicuously into the heart of them, because she looked like Courtney, too. Her tangle of hair had been blown glass-straight; her heels were three inches high, even though there was still snow on the ground. If she appeared the same on the outside, it was that much easier to ignore the fact that she didn’t really know how she felt on the inside.

“Hey,” Maddie said, as Courtney sat down beside her.

“Hey.”

“Did you hear about Fiona Kierland?”

Courtney’s eyes lit up; gossip was as good a catalyst as any chemical. “The one whose boobs are two different sizes?”

“No, that’s Fiona the sophomore. I’m talking about Fiona the freshman.”

“The one who always carries a box of tissues for her allergies?” Josie said, sliding into a seat.

“Or not,” Haley said. “Guess who got sent to rehab for snorting coke.”

“Get out.”

“That’s not even the whole scandal,” Emma added. “Her dealer was the head of the Bible study group that meets after school.”

“Oh my God!” Courtney said.

“Exactly.”

“Hey.” Matt slipped into the chair beside Josie. “What took you so long?”

She turned to him. At this end of the table, the guys were rolling straw wrappers into spitballs and talking about the end of spring skiing. “How long do you think the half-pipe will stay open at Sunapee?” John asked, lobbing a spitball toward a kid one table away who had fallen asleep.

The boy had been in Josie’s Sign Language elective last year. Like her, he was a junior. His arms and legs were skinny and white and splayed like a stickbug; his mouth, as he snored, was wide-open.

“You missed, loser,” Drew said. “If Sunapee closes, Killington’s still good. They have snow until, like, August.” His spitball landed in the boy’s hair.

Derek. The kid’s name was Derek.

Matt glanced at Josie’s French fries. “You’re not going to eat those, are you?”

“I’m starving.”

He pinched the side of her waist, a caliper and a criticism all at once. Josie looked down at the fries. Ten seconds ago, they’d looked golden brown and smelled like heaven; now all she could see was the grease that stained the paper plate.

Matt took a handful and passed the rest to Drew, who threw a spitball that landed in the sleeping boy’s mouth. With a choke and a sputter, Derek startled awake.

“Sweet!” Drew high-fived John.

Derek spat into a napkin and rubbed his mouth hard. He glanced around to see who else had been watching. Josie suddenly remembered a sign from her ASL elective, almost all of which she’d forgotten the moment she’d taken the final. A closed fist moved in a circle over the heart meant I’m sorry.

Matt leaned over and kissed her neck. “Let’s get out of here.” He drew Josie to her feet and then turned to his friends. “Later,” he said.

The gymnasium at Sterling High School was on the second floor, above what would have been a swimming pool if the bond issue had passed when the school was in its planning stages, and what instead became three classrooms that continually resounded with the pounding of sneakered feet and bouncing basketballs. Michael Beach and his best friend, Justin Friedman, two freshmen, sat on the sidelines of the basketball court while their Phys Ed teacher went over the mechanics of dribbling for the hundredth time. It was a wasted exercise-kids in this class were either like Noah James, already an expert, or like Michael and Justin, who were fluent in Elvish but defined home run as what you did after school in order to avoid getting hung up on coat hooks by your underwear. They sat cross-legged and knob-kneed, listening to the rodent’s squeak of Coach Spears’s white sneakers as he hustled from one end of the court to the other.

“Ten bucks says I get picked last for a team,” Justin murmured.

“I wish we could get out of class,” Michael commiserated. “Maybe there’ll be a fire drill.”

Justin grinned. “An earthquake.”

“A monsoon.”

“Locusts!”

“A terrorist attack!”

Two sneakers stopped in front of them. Coach Spears glared down, his arms folded. “You two want to tell me what’s so funny about basketball?”

Michael glanced at Justin, then up at the coach. “Absolutely nothing,” he said.

After showering, Lacy Houghton made herself a mug of green tea and wandered peacefully through her house. When the kids had been tiny and she’d been overwhelmed by work and life, Lewis would ask her what he could do to make things better. It had been a great irony for her, given Lewis’s job. A professor at Sterling College, his specialty was the economics of happiness. Yes, it was a real field of study, and yes, he was an expert. He’d taught seminars and written articles and had been interviewed on CNN about measuring the effects of pleasure and good fortune on a monetary scale-and yet he’d been at a loss when it came to figuring out what Lacy would enjoy. Did she want to go out to a nice dinner? Get a pedicure? Take a nap? When she told him what she craved, though, he could not comprehend. She’d wanted to be in her own house, with nobody else in it, and nothing pressing to do.

She opened the door to Peter’s room and set her mug on the dresser so that she could make his bed. What’s the point, Peter would say when she dogged him to do it himself. I just have to mess it up again in a few hours.

For the most part, she didn’t enter Peter’s room unless he was in it. Maybe that was why, at first, she felt there was something wrong about the space, as if an integral part were missing. At first she assumed that it was Peter’s absence that made the room seem a little empty, then she realized that the computer-a steady hum, an ever-ready green screen-had been turned off.

She tugged the sheets up and tucked in the edges; she drew the quilt over them and fluffed the pillows. At the threshold of Peter’s bedroom she paused and smiled: the room looked perfect.

Zoe Patterson was wondering what it was like to kiss a guy who had braces. Not that it was a remote possibility for her anytime in the near future, but she figured it was something she ought to consider before the moment actually caught her off guard. In fact, she wondered what it would be like to kiss a guy, period-even one who wasn’t orthodontically challenged, like her. And honestly, was there any place better than a stupid math class to let your mind wander?

Mr. McCabe, who thought he was the Chris Rock of algebra, was doing his daily stand-up routine. “So, two kids are in the lunch line, when the first kid turns to his friend and says, ‘I have no money! What should I do?’ And his buddy says, ‘2x + 5!’”

Zoe looked up at the clock. She counted along with the second hand until it was 9:50 on the dot and then popped out of her seat to hand Mr. McCabe a pass. “Ah, orthodontia,” he read out loud. “Well, make sure he doesn’t wire your mouth shut, Ms. Patterson. So, the buddy says, ‘2x + 5.’ A binomial. Get it? Buy-no-meal?!”

Zoe hefted her backpack onto her shoulders and walked out of the classroom. She had to meet her mom in front of the school at ten o’clock-parking was killer, so it would be a drive-by pickup. Mid-class, the halls were hollow and resonant; it felt like trudging through the belly of a whale. Zoe detoured into the main office to sign out on the secretary’s clipboard, and then nearly mowed down a kid in her hurry to get outside.

It was warm enough to unzip her jacket and think of summer and soccer camp and what it would be like when her palate expander was finally removed. If you kissed a guy who didn’t have braces, and you pressed too hard, could you cut his gums? Something told Zoe that if you made a guy bleed, you probably wouldn’t be hooking up with him again. What if he had braces, too, like that blond kid from Chicago who’d just transferred and sat in front of her in English (not that she liked him or anything, although he had turned around to hand her back her homework paper and held on to it just a smidgen too long…)? Would they get stuck together like jammed gears and have to be taken to the emergency room at the hospital, and how totally humiliating would that be?

Zoe ran her tongue along the ragged metal fence posts in her mouth. Maybe she could temporarily join a convent.

She sighed and peered down the block to see whether she could make out her mom’s green Explorer from the conga line of passing cars. And just about then, something exploded.

Patrick sat at a red light in his unmarked police car, waiting to turn onto the highway. Beside him, on the passenger seat, was a paper bag with a vial of cocaine inside it. The dealer they’d busted at the high school had admitted it was cocaine, and yet Patrick had to waste half his day taking it to the state lab so that someone in a white coat could tell him what he already knew. He fiddled with the volume button of the dispatch radio just in time to hear the fire department being sent to the high school for an explosion. Probably the boiler; the school was old enough for its internal structure to be falling apart. He tried to remember where the boiler was located in Sterling High, and wondered if they’d be lucky enough to come out of that kind of situation without anyone being hurt.

Shots fired…

The light turned green, but Patrick didn’t move. The discharge of a gun in Sterling was rare enough to have him narrow his attention to the voice on the dispatch radio, waiting for an explanation.

At the high school…Sterling High…

The dispatcher’s voice was getting faster, more intense. Patrick wheeled the car in a U-turn and started toward the school with his lights flashing. Other voices began to transmit in static bursts: officers stating their positions in town; the on-duty supervisor trying to coordinate manpower and calling for mutual aid from Hanover and Lebanon. Their voices knotted and tangled, blocking one another so that everything and nothing was being said at once.

Signal 1000, the dispatcher said. Signal 1000.

In Patrick’s entire career as a detective, he’d only heard that call twice. Once was in Maine, when a deadbeat dad had taken an officer hostage. Once was in Sterling, during a potential bank robbery that turned out to be a false alarm. Signal 1000 meant that everyone, immediately, was to get off the radio and leave it free for dispatch. It meant that what they were dealing with was not routine police business.

It meant life or death.

Chaos was a constellation of students, running out of the school and trampling the injured. A boy holding a handmade sign in an upstairs window that read help us. Two girls hugging each other and sobbing. Chaos was blood melting pink on the snow; it was the drip of parents that turned into a stream and then a raging river, screaming out the names of their missing children. Chaos was a TV camera in your face, not enough ambulances, not enough officers, and no plan for how to react when the world as you knew it went to pieces.

Patrick pulled halfway onto the sidewalk and grabbed his bulletproof vest from the back of the car. Already, adrenaline pulsed through him, making the edges of his vision swim and his senses more acute. He found Chief O’Rourke standing with a megaphone in the middle of the melee. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with yet,” the chief said. “SOU’s on its way.”

Patrick didn’t give a damn about the Special Operations Unit. By the time the SWAT team got here, a hundred more shots might be fired; a kid might be killed. He drew his gun. “I’m going in.”

“The hell you are. That’s not protocol.”

“There is no fucking protocol for this,” Patrick snapped. “You can fire me later.”

As he raced up the steps to the school, he was vaguely aware of two other patrol officers bucking the chief’s commands and joining him in the fray. Patrick directed them each down a different hallway, and then he himself pushed through the double doors, past students who were shoving each other in an effort to get outside. Fire alarms blared so loudly that Patrick had to strain to hear the gunshots. He grabbed the coat of a boy streaking past him. “Who is it?” he yelled. “Who’s shooting?”

The kid shook his head, speechless, and wrenched away. Patrick watched him run crazily down the hallway, open the door, burst into a rectangle of sunlight.

Students funneled around him, as if he were a stone in a river. Smoke billowed and burned his eyes. Patrick heard another staccato of gunshots, and had to restrain himself from running toward them blindly. “How many of them?” he cried as a girl ran by.

“I…I don’t know…”

The boy beside her turned around and looked at Patrick, torn between offering knowledge and getting the hell out of there. “It’s a kid…he’s shooting everyone…”

That was enough. Patrick pushed against the tide, a salmon swimming upstream. Homework papers were scattered on the floor; shell casings rolled beneath the heels of his shoes. Ceiling tiles had been shot off, and a fine gray dust coated the broken bodies that lay twisted on the floor. Patrick ignored all of this, going against most of his training-running past doors that might hide a perp, disregarding rooms that should have been searched-instead driving forward with his weapon drawn and his heart beating through every inch of his skin. Later, he would remember other sights that he didn’t have time to register right away: the heating duct covers that had been pried loose so that students could hide in the crawl space; the shoes left behind by kids who literally ran out of them; the eerie prescience of crime-scene outlines on the floor outside the biology classrooms, where students had been tracing their own bodies on butcher paper for an assignment.

He ran through hallways that seemed to circle in on each other. “Where?” he would bite out every time he passed a fleeing student-his only tool of navigation. He’d see sprays of blood, and students crumpled on the ground, and he did not let himself look twice. He pounded up the main stairwell, and just as he reached the top, a door cracked open. Patrick whirled, pointing his gun, as a young female teacher fell to her knees with her hands raised. Behind the white oval of her face were twelve others, featureless and frightened. Patrick could smell urine.

He lowered his gun and beckoned her toward the staircase. “Go,” he commanded, but he did not stay long enough to see if they did.

Turning a corner, Patrick slipped on blood and heard another gunshot, this one loud enough to ring his ears. He swept into the open double doors of the gymnasium and scanned the handful of sprawled bodies, the basketball cart overturned and the globes resting against the far wall-but no shooter. He knew, from the overtime detail he’d taken on Friday nights to monitor high school ball games, that he’d reached the far end of Sterling High. Which meant that the shooter was either hiding somewhere here or had doubled back past him when Patrick hadn’t noticed…and could even now have cornered him in this gym.

Patrick spun around to the entrance again to see if that was the case, and then heard another shot. He ran to a door that led out from the gym, one he hadn’t noticed in his first quick visual sweep of the area. It was a locker room, tiled white on the walls and the floor. He glanced down, saw the fanned spray of blood at his feet, and edged his gun around the corner wall.

Two bodies lay unmoving at one end of the locker room. At the other, closer to Patrick, a slight boy crouched beside a bank of lockers. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, crooked on his thin face. He was shivering hard.

“Are you okay?” Patrick whispered. He did not want to speak out loud and give away his position to the shooter.

The boy only blinked at him.

“Where is he?” Patrick mouthed.

The boy pulled a pistol from beneath his thigh and held it up to his own head.

A new rush of heat surged through Patrick. “Don’t fucking move,” he shouted, drawing a bead on the boy. “Drop the gun or I will shoot you.” Sweat broke out down his back and on his forehead, and he could feel his cupped hands shifting on the butt of the gun as he aimed, determined to lace the kid with bullets if he had to.

Patrick let his forefinger brush gently against the trigger just as the boy opened his fingers wide as a starfish. The pistol fell to the floor, skittering across the tile.

Immediately, he pounced. One of the other officers-whom Patrick hadn’t even noticed following him-retrieved the boy’s weapon. Patrick dropped the kid onto his stomach and cuffed him, pressing his knee hard into the boy’s spine. “Are you alone? Who’s with you?”

“Just me,” the boy ground out.

Patrick’s head was spinning and his pulse was a military tattoo, but he could vaguely hear the other officer calling this information in over the radio: “Sterling, we have one in custody; we don’t have knowledge of anyone else.”

Just as seamlessly as it had started, it was over-at least as much as something like this could be considered over. Patrick didn’t know if there were booby traps or bombs in the school; he didn’t know how many casualties there were; he didn’t know how many wounded Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and Alice Peck Day Hospital could take; he didn’t know how to go about processing a crime scene this massive. The target had been taken out, but at what irreplaceable cost? Patrick’s entire body began to shake, knowing that for so many students and parents and citizens today, he had once again been too late.

He took a few steps and sank down to his knees, mostly because his legs simply gave out from underneath them, and pretended that this was intentional, that he wanted to check out the two bodies at the other end of the room. He was vaguely aware of the shooter being pushed out of the locker room by the other officer, to a waiting cruiser downstairs. He didn’t turn to watch the kid go; instead he focused on the body directly in front of him.

A boy, dressed in a hockey jersey. There was a puddle of blood underneath his side, and a gunshot wound through his forehead. Patrick reached out for a baseball cap that had fallen a few feet away, with the words STERLING HOCKEY embroidered across it. He turned the brim around in his hands, an imperfect circle.

The girl lying next to him was facedown, blood spreading from beneath her temple. She was barefoot, and on her toenails was bright pink polish-just like the stuff Tara had put on Patrick. It made his heart catch. This girl, just like his goddaughter and her brother and a million other kids in this country, had gotten up today and gone to school never imagining she would be in danger. She trusted all the grown-ups and teachers and principals to keep her safe. It was why these schools, post-9/11, had teachers wearing ID all the time and doors locked during the day-the enemy was always supposed to be an outsider, not the kid who was sitting right next to you.

Suddenly, the girl shifted. “Help…me…”

Patrick knelt beside her. “I’m here,” he said, his touch gentle as he assessed her condition. “Everything’s all right.” He turned her enough to see that the blood was coming from a cut on her scalp, not a gunshot wound, as he’d assumed. He ran his hands over her limbs. He kept murmuring to her, words that did not always make sense, but that let her know that she wasn’t alone anymore. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Josie…” The girl started to thrash, trying to sit up. Patrick put the bulk of his body strategically between her and the boy’s-she’d be in shock already; he didn’t need her to go over the edge. She touched her hand to her forehead, and when it came away oily with blood, she panicked. “What…happened?”

He should have stayed there and waited for the medics to come get her. He should have radioed for help. But should hardly seemed to apply anymore, and so Patrick lifted Josie into his arms. He carried her out of the locker room where she’d nearly been killed, hurried down the stairs, and pushed through the front door of the school, as if he might be able to save them both.

Seventeen Years Before

T here were fourteen people sitting in front of Lacy, if you counted the fact that each of the seven women attending this prenatal class was pregnant. Some of them had come equipped with notebooks and pens, and had spent the past hour and a half writing down recommended dosages of folic acid, the names of teratogens, and suggested diets for a mother-to-be. Two had turned green in the middle of the discussion of a normal birth and had rushed to the bathroom with morning sickness-which, of course, stretched as long as the whole day, and was like saying summertime when you really meant all four seasons of the year.

She was tired. Only a week back into work after her own maternity leave, it seemed patently unfair that if she wasn’t up all night with her own baby, she had to be awake delivering someone else’s. Her breasts ached, an uncomfortable reminder that she had to go pump again, so that she’d have milk to leave the sitter tomorrow for Peter.

And yet, she loved her job too much to give it up entirely. She’d had the grades to get into medical school, and had considered being an OB/GYN, until she realized that she had a profound inability to sit bedside by a patient and not feel her pain. Doctors put a wall up between themselves and their patients; nurses broke it down. She switched into a program that would certify her as a nurse-midwife, that encouraged her to tap into the emotional health of a mother-to-be instead of just her symptomology. Maybe it made some of the doctors at the hospital consider her a flake, but Lacy truly believed that when you asked a patient How do you feel?, what was wrong wasn’t nearly as important as what was right.

She reached past the plastic model of the growing fetus and lifted a best-selling pregnancy guidebook into the air. “How many of you have seen this book before?”

Seven hands lifted.

“Okay. Do not buy this book. Do not read this book. If it’s already at your house, throw it out. This book will convince you that you are going to bleed out, have seizures, drop dead, or any of a hundred other things that do not happen with normal pregnancies. Believe me, the range of normal is much wider than anything these authors will tell you.”

She glanced in the back, where a woman was holding her side. Cramping? Lacy thought. Ectopic pregnancy?

The woman was dressed in a black suit, her hair pulled back into a neat, low ponytail. Lacy watched her pinch her waist once again, this time pulling off a small beeper attached to her skirt. She got to her feet. “I…um, I’m sorry. I have to go.”

“Can it wait a few minutes?” Lacy asked. “We’re just about to go on a tour of the birthing pavilion.”

The woman handed her the paperwork she’d been asked to fill out during this visit. “I have something more pressing to deal with,” she said, and she hurried off.

“Well,” Lacy said. “Maybe this is a good time for a bathroom break.” As the six remaining women filed out of the room, she glanced down at the forms in her hand. Alexandra Cormier, she read. And she thought: I’m going to have to watch this one.

The last time Alex had defended Loomis Bronchetti, he had broken into three homes and stolen electronics equipment, which he then tried to fence on the streets of Enfield, New Hampshire. Although Loomis was enterprising enough to dream up this scheme, he failed to realize that in a town as small as Enfield, hot stereo equipment might raise a red flag.

Apparently, Loomis had escalated his criminal résumé last night when he and two friends decided to go after a drug dealer who didn’t bring them enough pot. They got high, hog-tied the guy, and threw him in the trunk. Loomis whacked the dealer over the head with a baseball bat, cracking his skull and sending him into convulsions. When he started choking on his own blood, Loomis turned him over so that he could breathe.

“I can’t believe they’re charging me with assault,” Loomis told Alex through the bars of the holding cell. “I saved the guy’s life.”

“Well,” Alex said. “We might have been able to use that-if you hadn’t been the one who inflicted the injury in the first place.”

“You gotta plead me out for less than a year. I don’t want to get sent down to the prison in Concord…”

“You could have been charged with attempted murder, you know.”

Loomis scowled. “I was doing the cops a favor, getting a lowlife like that off the streets.”

The same, Alex knew, could be said for Loomis Bronchetti, if he was convicted and sent to the state prison. But her job was not about judging Loomis. It was about working hard, in spite of her personal opinions about a client. It was about showing one face to Loomis, and knowing she had another one masked away. It was about not letting her feelings interfere with her ability to get Loomis Bronchetti acquitted.

“Let me see what I can do,” she said.

Lacy understood that all infants were different-tiny little creatures with their own quirks and habits and peeves and desires. But somehow, she’d expected that this second foray into motherhood would produce a child like her first-Joey, a golden boy who would make passersby turn their heads, stop her as she pushed the stroller to tell her what a beautiful child she had. Peter was just as beautiful, but he was definitely a more challenging baby. He’d cry, colicky, and have to be soothed by putting his car seat on the vibrating clothes dryer. He’d be nursing, and suddenly arch away from her.

It was two in the morning, and Lacy was trying to get Peter to settle back to sleep. Unlike Joey, who fell into slumber like taking a giant step off a cliff, Peter fought it every step of the way. She patted his back and rubbed small circles between his tiny shoulder blades as he hiccuped and wailed. Frankly, she felt like doing that, too. For the past two hours, she’d watched the same infomercial on Ginsu knives. She had counted the ticking stripes on the elephantine arm of the sofa until they blurred. She was so exhausted that everything ached. “What’s the matter, little man,” she sighed. “What can I do to make you happy?”

Happiness was relative, according to her husband. Although most people laughed when Lacy told them her husband’s job involved putting a price on joy, it was simply what economists did-find value for the intangibles in life. Lewis’s colleagues at Sterling College had presented papers on the relative push an education could provide, or universal health care, or job satisfaction. Lewis’s discipline was no less important, if unorthodox. It made him a popular guest on NPR, on Larry King, at corporate seminars-somehow, number crunching seemed sexier when you began talking about the dollar amount a belly laugh was worth, or a dumb blonde joke, for that matter. Regular sex, for example, was equivalent (happinesswise) to getting a $50,000 raise. However, getting a $50,000 raise wouldn’t be nearly as exciting if everyone else was getting a $50,000 raise, too. By the same token, what made you happy once might not make you happy now. Five years ago, Lacy would have given anything for a dozen roses brought home by her husband; now, if he offered her the chance to take a ten-minute nap, she would fall to the ground in paroxysms of delight.

Statistics aside, Lewis would go down in history as being the economist who’d conceived a mathematical formula for happiness: R/E, or, Reality divided by Expectations. There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations. Once, at a neighborhood dinner party, Lacy had asked him what happened if you had no expectations. You couldn’t divide by zero. Did that mean if you just let yourself roll with all of life’s punches, you could never be happy? In the car later that night, Lewis had accused her of trying to make him look bad.

Lacy didn’t like to let herself consider whether Lewis and their family were truly happy. You’d think the man who designed the formula would have happiness figured out, but somehow, it didn’t work that way. Sometimes she’d recall that old adage-the shoemaker’s sons go barefoot-and she’d wonder, What about the children of the man who knows the value of happiness? These days, when Lewis was late at the office, working on another publication deadline, and Lacy was so exhausted she could fall asleep standing up in the hospital elevator, she tried to convince herself it was simply a phase they were stuck in: a baby boot camp that would surely transform one day into contentment and satisfaction and togetherness and all the other parameters Lewis plotted on his computer programs. After all, she had a husband who loved her and two healthy boys and a fulfilling career. Wasn’t getting what you wanted all along the very definition of being happy?

She realized that-miracle of miracles-Peter had fallen asleep on her shoulder, the sweet peach of his cheek pressed against her bare skin. Tiptoeing up the stairs, she gently settled him into his crib and then glanced across the room at the bed where Joey lay. The moon fawned over him like a disciple. She wondered what Peter would be like when he was Joey’s age. She wondered if you could get that lucky twice.

Alex Cormier was younger than Lacy had thought. Twenty-four, but she carried herself with enough confidence to make people think she was a decade older. “So,” Lacy said, introducing herself. “How did that pressing matter turn out?”

Alex blinked at her, then remembered: the birthing pavilion tour she had slipped away from a week ago. “It was plea bargained.”

“You’re a lawyer, then?” Lacy said, glancing up from her notes.

“A public defender.” Alex’s chin came up a notch, as if she was ready for Lacy to make a deprecating comment about her affiliation with the bad guys.

“That must be awfully demanding work,” Lacy said. “Does your office know you’re pregnant?”

Alex shook her head. “It’s not an issue,” she said flatly. “I won’t be taking a maternity leave.”

“You might change your mind as-”

“I’m not keeping this baby,” Alex announced.

Lacy sat back in her chair. “All right.” It was not her place to judge a mother for the decision to give up a child. “We can talk about different options, then,” Lacy said. At eleven weeks, Alex could still terminate the pregnancy if she wished.

“I was going to have an abortion,” Alex said, as if she’d read Lacy’s mind. “But I missed my appointment.” She glanced up. “Twice.”

Lacy knew you could be solidly pro-choice but unwilling or unable to make that decision for yourself-that’s exactly where the choice part kicked in. “Well, then,” she said, “I can give you information about adoption, if you haven’t already contacted any agencies yourself.” She reached into a drawer and pulled out folders-adoption agencies affiliated with a variety of religions, attorneys who specialized in private adoptions. Alex took the pamphlets and held them like a hand of playing cards. “For now, though, we can just focus on you and how you’re doing.”

“I’m great,” Alex answered smoothly. “I’m not sick, I’m not tired.” She looked at her watch. “I am, however, going to be late for an appointment.”

Lacy could tell that Alex was a coper-someone who was used to being in control in all facets of her life. “It’s okay to slow down when you’re pregnant. Your body might need that.”

“I know how to take care of myself.”

“What about letting someone else do it once in a while?”

A shadow of irritation crossed over Alex’s face. “Look, I don’t need a therapy session. Honestly. I appreciate the concern, but-”

“Does your partner support your decision to give the baby up?” Lacy asked.

Alex turned her face away for a moment. Before Lacy could find the right words to draw her back, however, Alex did it herself. “There is no partner,” she said coolly.

The last time Alex’s body had taken over, had done what her mind told her not to do, she had conceived this baby. It had started innocently enough-Logan Rourke, her trial advocacy professor, calling her into his office to tell her that she commanded the courtroom with competence; Logan saying that no juror would be able to take his eyes off her-and that neither could he. Alex had thought Logan was Clarence Darrow and F. Lee Bailey and God rolled up into one. Prestige and power could make a man so attractive it took one’s breath away; it turned Logan into what she’d been looking for her whole life.

She believed him when he told her he hadn’t seen a student with as quick a mind as Alex in his ten years of teaching. She believed him when he told her that his marriage was over in all but name. And she believed him the night he drove her home from the campus, framed her face between his hands, and told her she was the reason he got up in the morning.

Law was a study of detail and fact, not emotion. Alex’s cardinal mistake had been forgetting this when she became involved with Logan. She found herself postponing plans, waiting for his call, which sometimes came and sometimes didn’t. She pretended that she did not see him flirting with the first-year law students who looked at him the way she used to. And when she got pregnant, she convinced herself that they were meant to spend the rest of their lives together.

Logan had told her to get rid of it. She’d scheduled an abortion, only to forget to write the date and time on her calendar. She rescheduled, but realized too late that her appointment conflicted with a final exam. After that, she’d gone to Logan. It’s a sign, she’d said.

Maybe, he told her, but it doesn’t mean what you’re thinking. Be reasonable, Logan had said. A single mother will never make it as a trial attorney. She’d have to choose between her career and this baby.

What he really meant was that she’d have to choose between having the baby and having him.

The woman looked familiar from behind, in that way that people sometimes do when you see them out of context: your grocery clerk standing in line at the bank, your postman sitting across the aisle of the movie theater. Alex stared for another second, and then realized it was the infant throwing her off. She strode across the hallway of the courthouse toward the town clerk, where Lacy Houghton stood paying a parking ticket.

“Need a lawyer?” Alex asked.

Lacy looked up, the baby carrier balanced in the crook of her arm. It took a moment to place the face-she hadn’t seen Alex since her initial visit nearly a month ago. “Oh, hello!” she said, smiling.

“What brings you to my neck of the woods?”

“Oh, I’m posting bail for my ex…” Lacy waited for Alex’s eyes to widen, and then laughed. “Just kidding. I got a parking ticket.”

Alex found herself staring down at the face of Lacy’s son. He wore a blue cap that tied underneath his chin, and his cheeks spilled over the edges of the fleece. He had a runny nose, and when he noticed Alex looking at him, he offered her a cavernous smile.

“Would you like to grab a cup of coffee?” Lacy said.

She slapped ten dollars down on top of her parking ticket and fed it through the open mouth of the payment window, then hefted the baby bucket a little higher into the crook of her arm and walked out of the court building to a Dunkin’ Donuts across the street. Lacy stopped to give a ten-dollar bill to a bum sitting outside the courthouse, and Alex rolled her eyes-she’d actually seen this particular fellow heading over to the closest bar yesterday when she left work.

In the coffee shop, Alex watched Lacy effortlessly unpeel layers of clothing from her baby and lift him out of his seat onto her lap. As she talked, she draped a blanket over her shoulder and started to nurse Peter. “Is it hard?” Alex blurted out.

“Nursing?”

“Not just that,” Alex said. “Everything.”

“It’s definitely an acquired skill.” Lacy lifted the baby onto her shoulder. His booted feet kicked against her chest, as if he was already trying to put distance between them. “Compared to your day job, motherhood is probably a piece of cake.”

It made Alex think, immediately, of Logan Rourke, who had laughed at her when she said she was taking a job with the public defender’s office. You won’t last a week, he’d told her. You’re too soft for that.

She sometimes wondered if she was a good public defender because of skill or because she had been so determined to show Logan that he was wrong. In any case, Alex had cultivated a persona on the job, one that was there to give offenders an equal voice in the legal system, without letting clients get under her skin.

She’d already made that mistake with Logan.

“Did you get a chance to contact any of the adoption agencies?” Lacy asked.

Alex had not even taken the pamphlets she’d been given. For all she knew, they were still sitting on the counter of the examination room.

“I put in a few calls,” Alex lied. She had it on her To Do list at work. It was just that something else always got in the way.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” Lacy said, and Alex nodded slowly-she did not like personal questions. “What made you decide to give the baby up?”

Had she ever really made that decision? Or had it been made for her?

“This isn’t a good time,” Alex said.

Lacy laughed. “I don’t know if it’s ever a good time to have a baby. Your life certainly gets turned upside down.”

Alex stared at her. “I like my life right side up.”

Lacy fussed with her baby’s shirt for a moment. “In a way, what you and I do isn’t really all that different.”

“The recidivism rate is probably about the same,” Alex said.

“No…I meant that we both see people when they’re at their most raw. That’s what I love about midwifery. You see how strong someone is, in the face of a really painful situation.” She glanced up at Alex. “Isn’t it amazing how, when you strip away everything, people are so much alike?”

Alex thought of the defendants that had paraded through her professional life. They all blurred together in her mind. But was that because, as Lacy said, we were all similar? Or was it because Alex had become an expert at not looking too closely?

She watched Lacy settle the baby on her knee. His hands smacked the table, and he made little gurgling noises. Suddenly Lacy stood up, thrusting the baby toward Alex so that she had to hold him or risk having him tumble onto the floor. “Here, hang on to Peter. I just have to run into the bathroom.”

Alex panicked. Wait, she thought. I don’t know what I’m doing. The baby’s legs kicked, like a cartoon character who’d run off a cliff.

Awkwardly, Alex sat him down on her lap. He was heavier than she would have imagined, and his skin felt like damp velvet. “Peter,” she said formally. “I’m Alex.”

The baby reached for her coffee cup, and she lurched forward to push it out of reach. Peter’s face pinched tight as a lime, and he started to cry.

The screams were shattering, decibel-rich, cataclysmic. “Stop,” Alex begged, as people around her started to stare. She stood up, patting Peter’s back the way Lacy had, wishing he would run out of steam or contract laryngitis or just simply have mercy on her utter inexperience. Alex-who always had the perfect witty comeback, who could be thrown into a hellish legal situation and land on her feet every time without even breaking a sweat-found herself completely at a loss.

She sat down and held Peter beneath his armpits. By now, he’d turned tomato-red, his skin so angry and dark that his soft fuzz of hair glowed like platinum. “Listen,” she said. “I may not be what you want right now, but I’m all you’ve got.”

On a final hiccup, the baby quieted. He stared into Alex’s eyes, as if he was trying to place her.

Relieved, Alex settled him into the sling of her arm and sat a little taller. She glanced down at the top of the baby’s head, at the translucent pulse beneath his fontanelle.

When she relaxed her grip on the baby, he relaxed, too. Was it that easy?

Alex traced her finger over the soft spot on Peter’s head. She knew the biology behind it: the plates of the skull shifted enough to make giving birth easier; they fused together by the time the baby was a toddler. It was a vulnerability we were all born with, one that literally grew into an adult’s hardheadedness.

“Sorry,” Lacy said, breezing back to the table. “Thanks for that.”

Alex thrust the baby out toward her as if she were being burned.

The patient had been transferred from a thirty-hour home birth. A firm believer in natural medicine, she’d had limited prenatal care, no amnio, no sonograms, and yet newborns had a way of getting what they wanted and needed when it came time to arrive in the world. Lacy laid her hands on the woman’s trembling belly like a faith healer. Six pounds, she thought, bottom up here, head down here. A doctor poked his head through the door. “How’s it going in here?”

“Tell the intensive-care nursery we’re at thirty-five weeks,” she said, “but everything seems to be fine.” As the doctor backed away, she settled herself between the woman’s legs. “I know this has been going on for what seems like forever,” she said. “But if you can work with me for just one more hour, you’ll have this baby.”

As she directed the woman’s husband to get behind his wife, holding her upright as she began to push, Lacy felt her pager vibrate at the waistline of her sea-blue scrubs. Who the hell could it be? She was already on call; her secretary knew she was assisting at a birth.

“Will you excuse me?” she said, leaving the labor nurse in the room to fill in while she walked to the nurses’ desk and borrowed a telephone. “What’s going on?” Lacy asked when her secretary picked up.

“One of your patients, insisting to see you.”

“I’m a little busy,” Lacy said pointedly.

“She said she’ll wait. For however long it takes.”

“Who is it?”

“Alex Cormier,” the secretary replied.

Normally, Lacy would have told her secretary to have the patient see one of the other midwives in the practice. But there was still something elusive about Alex Cormier, something she couldn’t put her finger on-something that wasn’t quite right. “All right,” Lacy said. “But tell her it might be hours.”

She hung up the phone and hurried back into the birthing room, where she reached between the patient’s legs to check her dilation. “Apparently, all you needed was for me to leave,” she joked. “You’re ten centimeters. The next time you feel like pushing…go to town.”

Ten minutes later, Lacy delivered a three-pound baby girl. As the parents marveled over her, Lacy turned to the labor nurse, silently communicating with her eyes. Something had gone terribly wrong.

“She’s so tiny,” the father said. “Is there…is she okay?”

Lacy hesitated, because she didn’t really know the answer. A fibroid? she wondered. All she knew for certain was that there was a lot more inside that woman than a three-pound infant. And that any moment now, her patient was going to start to bleed.

But when Lacy reached up to grab the patient’s belly and press down on her uterus, she froze. “Did anyone tell you you were having twins?”

The father went ashen. “There’s two in there?”

Lacy grinned. Twins, she could handle. Twins-well, that was a bonus, not some horrible medical disaster. “Well. Only one now.”

The man crouched down beside his wife and kissed her forehead, delighted. “Did you hear that, Terri? Twins.”

His wife did not take her eyes off her tiny newborn daughter. “That’s nice,” she said calmly. “But I’m not pushing a second one out.”

Lacy laughed. “Oh, I think I might be able to get you to change your mind.”

Forty minutes later, Lacy left the happy family-with their twin daughters-and headed down the hallway to the staff restroom, where she splashed water on her face and changed into a fresh pair of scrubs. She took the stairs up to the midwifery office and glanced at the collection of women, sitting with their arms balanced on bellies of all sizes, like moons in different stages. One rose, red-eyed and unsteady, as if she’d been pulled upright magnetically by Lacy’s arrival. “Alex,” she said, remembering only in that instant that she had another patient waiting. “Why don’t you come with me.”

She led Alex into an empty examination room and sat down across from her in a chair. At that moment Lacy noticed that Alex’s sweater was on backward. It was a pale blue crewneck-you could barely even tell, except that the tag had flapped out along the curve of her neck. And it was certainly something that might happen to anyone in a rush, anyone upset…but probably not Alex Cormier.

“There’s been bleeding,” Alex said, her voice even. “Not a lot, but. Um. Some.”

Taking a cue from Alex herself, Lacy kept her own response calm. “Why don’t we check anyway?”

Lacy led Alex down the hallway to fetal ultrasound. She charmed a tech into letting them cut the patient line, and once she had Alex lying down on the table, she turned on the machine. She moved the transducer across Alex’s abdomen. At sixteen weeks, the fetus looked like a baby-tiny, skeletal, but startlingly perfect. “Do you see that?” Lacy asked, pointing to a blinking cursor, a tiny black-and-white drumbeat. “That’s the baby’s heart.”

Alex turned her face away, but not before Lacy saw a tear streak down her cheek. “The baby’s fine,” she said. “And it’s perfectly normal to have some staining or spotting. It’s not anything you did that caused it; there’s nothing you can do to make it stop.”

“I thought I was having a miscarriage.”

“Once you see a normal baby, like we just did, the chance of miscarrying is less than one percent. Let me put that another way-your chance of carrying a normal baby to term is ninety-nine percent.”

Alex nodded, wiping at her eyes with her sleeve. “Good.”

Lacy hesitated. “It’s not my place to say this, really. But for someone who doesn’t want this baby, Alex, you seem awfully relieved to know she’s all right.”

“I don’t-I can’t-”

Lacy glanced at the ultrasound screen, where Alex’s baby was frozen in a moment of time. “Just think about it,” she said.

I already have a family, Logan Rourke said later that day when Alex told him she planned to keep the baby. I don’t need another one.

That night, Alex had an exorcism of sorts. She filled up her Weber grill with charcoal and lit a fire, then roasted every assignment she’d turned in to Logan Rourke. She had no photos of the two of them, no sweet notes-in retrospect, she realized how careful he’d been, how easily he could be erased from her life.

This baby, she decided, would be hers alone. She sat, watching the flames, and thought of the space it would take up inside her. She imagined her organs moving aside, skin stretching. She pictured her heart shrinking, tiny as a beach stone, to make room. She did not consider whether she was having this baby to prove that she hadn’t imagined her relationship with Logan Rourke, or to upset him as much as he had upset her. As any skilled trial attorney knows, you never ask the witness a question to which you do not know the answer.

Five weeks later, Lacy was no longer just Alex’s midwife. She was also her confidante, her best friend, her sounding board. Although Lacy didn’t normally socialize with her clients, for Alex she’d broken the rules. She told herself it was because Alex-who had now decided to keep this baby-really needed a support system, and there wasn’t anyone else she felt comfortable with.

It was the only reason, Lacy decided, she’d agreed to go out with Alex’s colleagues this evening. Even the prospect of a Girls’ Night Out, without babies, lost its luster in this company. Lacy should have realized two back-to-back root canals would have been preferable to dinner with a bunch of lawyers. They all liked to hear themselves talk, that was clear. She let the conversation flow around her, as if she were a stone in a river, and she kept refilling her wineglass with Coke from a pitcher.

The restaurant was some Italian place with very bad red sauce and a chef who went heavy on the garlic. She wondered if, in Italy, there were American restaurants.

Alex was in the middle of a heated discussion about some trial that had gone to jury. Lacy heard terms being tossed and fielded around the table: FLSA, Singh v. Jutla, incentives. A florid woman sitting to Lacy’s right shook her head. “It’s sending a message,” she said. “If you award damages for work that’s illegal, you’re sanctioning a company to be above the law.”

Alex laughed. “Sita, I’m just going to take this moment to remind you that you’re the only prosecutor at the table and there’s no way in hell you’re going to win this one.”

“We’re all biased. We need an objective observer.” Sita smiled at Lacy. “What’s your opinion on aliens?”

Maybe she should have paid more attention to the conversation-apparently it had taken a turn for the interesting while Lacy was woolgathering. “Well, I’m certainly not an expert, but I did finish a book a little while ago about Area 51 and the cover-up by the government. It went into specific detail about cattle mutilation-I find it very suspicious when a cow in Nevada winds up missing its kidneys and the incision doesn’t show any trauma to tissue or blood loss. I had a cat once that I think was abducted by aliens. She went missing for exactly four weeks-to the minute-and when she came back, she had triangle patterns burned out on the fur on her back, sort of like a crop circle.” Lacy hesitated. “But without the wheat.”

Everyone at the table stared at her, silent. A woman with a pinhole of a mouth and a sleek blond bob blinked at Lacy. “We were talking about illegal aliens.”

Lacy felt heat creep up her neck. “Oh,” she said. “Right.”

“Well, if you ask me,” Alex said, drawing attention in her own direction, “Lacy ought to be heading up the Department of Labor instead of Elaine Chao. She’s certainly got more experience…”

Everyone broke up in laughter, as Lacy watched. Alex, she realized, could fit anywhere. Here, or with Lacy’s family at dinner, or in a courtroom, or probably at tea with the queen. She was a chameleon.

It struck Lacy that she didn’t really know what color a chameleon was before it started changing.

There was a moment at each prenatal exam when Lacy channeled her inner faith healer: laying her hands on the patient’s belly and divining, just from the lay of the land, in which direction the baby lay. It always reminded her of those Halloween funhouses she took Joey to visit-you’d stick your hand behind a curtain and feel a bowl of cold spaghetti intestines, or a gelatin brain. It wasn’t an exact science, but basically, there were two hard parts on a fetus: the head and the bottom. If you rocked the baby’s head, it would twist on the stem of its spine. If you rocked the baby’s bottom, it swayed. Moving the head moved only the head; moving the bottom moved the whole baby.

She let her hands trail over the island of Alex’s belly and helped her sit up. “The good news is that the baby’s doing fine,” Lacy said. “The bad news is that right now, she’s upside down. Breech.”

Alex froze. “I’m going to need a C-section?”

“We’ve got eight weeks before it comes to that. There’s a lot we can do to try to turn the baby beforehand.”

“Like what?”

“Moxibustion.” She sat down across from Lacy. “I’ll give you the name of an acupuncturist. She’ll take a little stick of mugwort and hold it up to your little pinky. She’ll do the same thing on the other side. It won’t hurt, but it’ll be uncomfortably warm. Once you learn how to do it at home, if you start now chances are fairly good that the baby will turn in one to two weeks’ time.”

“Poking myself with a stick is going to make it flip?”

“Well, not necessarily. That’s why I also want you to set an ironing board up against the couch, to make an inclined plane. You should lie on it, head down, three times a day for fifteen minutes.”

“Jeez, Lacy. Are you sure you don’t want me to wear a crystal, too?”

“Believe me, any of those are considerably more comfortable than having a doctor do a version to turn the baby…or recuperating from a C-section.”

Alex folded her hands over her belly. “I don’t hold much faith in old wives’ tales.”

Lacy shrugged. “Luckily, you’re not the one who’s breech.”

You weren’t supposed to give your clients rides to court, but in Nadya Saranoff’s case, Alex had made an exception. Nadya’s husband had been abusive and had left her for another woman. He wouldn’t pay child support for their two boys, although he was making a decent living and Nadya’s job at Subway paid $5.25 an hour. She’d complained to the state, but justice worked too slow, so she’d gone to Wal-Mart and shoplifted a pair of pants and a white shirt for her five-year-old, who was starting school the following week and who had outgrown all of his clothing.

Nadya had pled guilty. Because she couldn’t afford a fine, she was given a thirty-day jail sentence deferred-which, as Alex was explaining to her now, meant that she wouldn’t have to go for a year. “If you go to jail,” she said, as they stood outside the ladies’ room in the courthouse, “your boys are going to suffer greatly. I know you felt desperate, but there’s always another option. A church. Or a Salvation Army.”

Nadya wiped her eyes. “I couldn’t get to the church or the Salvation Army. I haven’t got a car.”

Right. It was why Alex had brought her to court in the first place.

Alex steeled herself against sympathy as Nadya ducked into the bathroom. Her job had been to get Nadya a good deal, which she had, considering this was the woman’s second shoplifting offense. The first one had been at a drugstore; she’d pinched some Children’s Tylenol.

She thought of her own baby, the one who had her lying upside down on an ironing board and sticking torturous little daggers against her pinky toes every night, in the hopes that it would change position. What sort of disadvantage would it be to come into this world backward?

When ten minutes had passed and Nadya had not come out of the bathroom, Alex knocked on the door. “Nadya?” She found her client in front of the sinks, sobbing. “Nadya, what’s wrong?”

Her client ducked her head, mortified. “I just got my period, and I can’t afford a tampon.”

Alex reached for her purse, rummaging for a quarter to feed to the dispenser on the wall. But as the cardboard tube rolled out of the machine, something inside her snapped, and she understood that although this case had been settled, it wasn’t over yet. “Meet me out front,” she ordered. “I’m getting the car.”

She drove Nadya to Wal-Mart-the scene of her crime-and tossed three supersized Tampax boxes into a cart. “What else do you need?”

“Underwear,” Nadya whispered. “That was my last pair.”

Alex wheeled up and down the aisles, buying T-shirts and socks and panties and pajamas for Nadya; pants and coats and hats and gloves for her boys; boxes of Goldfish crackers and saltines and canned soup and pasta and Devil Dogs. Desperate, she did what she had to do at that moment, although it was exactly what the public defender’s office counseled their lawyers not to; but she was entirely rational and aware that she had never done this for a client and never would do it again. She spent eight hundred dollars in the very store that had pressed charges against Nadya, because it was easier to fix what was wrong than to picture her own child arriving into a world Alex herself could sometimes not stomach.

The catharsis ended the moment Alex handed the cashier her credit card and heard Logan Rourke’s voice in her mind. Bleeding heart, he’d called her.

Well. He should know.

He’d been the first to rip it to pieces.

All right, Alex thought calmly. This is what it’s like to die.

Another contraction ripped through her, bullets strafing metal.

Two weeks ago, at her thirty-seven-week visit, Alex and Lacy had talked about pain medication. What are your feelings about it? Lacy had asked, and Alex had made a joke: I think it should be imported from Canada. She’d told Lacy she didn’t plan to use pain medication, that she wanted a natural childbirth, that it couldn’t possibly hurt that much.

It did.

She thought back to all those birthing classes Lacy had forced her to take-the ones where she’d been partnered with Lacy, because everyone else had a husband or boyfriend assisting them. They’d shown pictures of women in labor, women with their rubbery faces and gritted teeth, women making prehistoric noises. Alex had scoffed at this. They are showing the worst-case scenarios, she’d told herself. Different people have different tolerance for pain.

The next contraction twisted down her spine like a cobra, wrapped itself around her belly, and sank its fangs. Alex fell hard on her knees on the kitchen floor.

In her classes, she’d learned that prelabor could go on for twelve hours or more.

By then, if she wasn’t dead, she’d shoot herself.

When Lacy had been a midwife in training, she’d spent months walking around with a little centimeter ruler, measuring. Now, after years on the job, she could eyeball a coffee cup and know that it was nine centimeters across, that the orange beside the phone at the nurses’ station was an eight. She withdrew her fingers from between Alex’s legs and snapped off the latex glove. “You’re two centimeters,” she said, and Alex burst into tears.

“Only two? I can’t do this,” Alex panted, twisting her spine to get away from the pain. She had tried to hide the discomfort behind the mask of competence that she usually wore, only to realize that in her hurry, she must have left it behind somewhere.

“I know you’re disappointed,” Lacy said. “But here’s the thing-you’re doing fine. We know that when people are fine at two centimeters they will be fine at eight, too. Let’s take it one contraction at a time.”

Labor was hard for everyone, Lacy knew, but especially hard for the women who had expectations and lists and plans, because it was never the way you thought it would be. In order to labor well, you had to let your body take over, instead of your mind. You revealed yourself, even the parts you had forgotten about. For someone like Alex, who was so used to being in control, this could be devastating. Success would come only at the expense of losing her cool, at the risk of turning into someone she did not want to be.

Lacy helped Alex off the bed and guided her toward the whirlpool room. She dimmed the lights, flicked on the instrumental music, and untied Alex’s robe. Alex was past the point of modesty; at this moment, Lacy figured she’d disrobe in front of an entire male prison population if it meant the contractions would stop.

“In you go,” Lacy said, letting Alex lean on her as she sank into the whirlpool. There was a Pavlovian response to warm water; sometimes just stepping into the tub could bring down a person’s heart rate.

“Lacy,” Alex gasped, “you have to promise…”

“Promise what?”

“You won’t tell her. The baby.”

Lacy reached for Alex’s hand. “Tell her what?”

Alex closed her eyes and pressed her cheek against the lip of the tub. “That at first I didn’t want her.”

Before she could even answer, Lacy watched tension grip Alex. “Breathe through this one,” she said. Blow the pain away from you, blow it between your hands, picture it as the color red. Come up on your hands and knees. Pour yourself inward, like sand in an hourglass. Go to the beach, Alex. Lie on the sand and see how warm the sun is.

Lie to yourself until it’s true.

When you’re hurting deeply, you go inward. Lacy had seen this a thousand times. Endorphins kick in-the body’s natural morphine-and carry you somewhere far away, where the pain can’t find you. Once, a client who’d been abused had dissociated so massively that Lacy was worried she would not be able to reach her again and bring her back in time to push. She had wound up singing to the woman in Spanish, a lullaby.

For three hours now, Alex had regained her composure, thanks to the anesthesiologist who’d given her an epidural. She’d slept for a while; she’d played hearts with Lacy. But now the baby had dropped, and she was starting to bear down. “Why is it hurting again?” she asked, her voice escalating.

“That’s how an epidural works. If we dose it up, you can’t push.”

“I can’t have a baby,” Alex blurted out. “I’m not ready.”

“Well,” Lacy said. “Maybe we ought to talk about that.”

“What was I thinking? Logan was right; I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’m not a mother, I’m a lawyer. I don’t have a boyfriend, I don’t have a dog…I don’t even have a houseplant I haven’t killed. I’m not even sure how to put on a diaper.”

“The little cartoon characters go on the front,” Lacy said. She took Alex’s hand and brought it down between her legs, to where the baby was crowning.

Alex jerked her hand away. “Is that…”

“Yeah.”

“It’s coming?”

“Ready or not.”

Another contraction started. “Oh, Alex, I can see the eyebrows…” Lacy eased the baby out of the birth canal, keeping the head flexed. “I know how much it burns…there’s her chin…beautiful…” Lacy wiped off the baby’s face, suctioned the mouth. She flipped the cord over the baby’s neck and looked up at her friend. “Alex,” she said, “let’s do this together.”

Lacy guided Alex’s shaking hands to cup the infant’s head. “Stay like that; I’m going to push down to get the shoulder…”

As the baby sluiced into Alex’s hands, Lacy let go. Sobbing, relieved, Alex brought the small, squirming body against her chest. As always, Lacy was taken by how available a newborn is-how present. She rubbed the small of the baby’s back and watched the newborn’s hazy blue eyes focus first on her mother. “Alex,” Lacy said. “She’s all yours.”

Nobody wants to admit to this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that’s because it’s all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do another bad thing, and so on. You know, like that game where you whisper a sentence into someone’s ear, and that person whispers it to someone else, and it all comes out wrong in the end.

But then again, maybe bad things happen because it’s the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.

Hours After

Once, at a bar, Patrick’s best friend, Nina, had asked what the worst thing he’d ever seen was. He’d answered truthfully-back when he was in Maine, and a guy had committed suicide by tying himself with wire to the train tracks; the train had literally cleaved him in two. There had been blood and body parts everywhere; seasoned officers reached the crime scene and started throwing up in the scrub brush. Patrick had walked away to gain his composure and found himself staring down at the man’s severed head, the mouth still round with a silent scream.

That was no longer the worst thing Patrick had ever seen.

There were still students streaming out of Sterling High as teams of EMTs began canvassing the building to take care of the wounded. Dozens of kids had minor cuts and bruises from the mass exodus, scores were hyperventilating or hysterical, and even more were in shock. But Patrick’s first priority was taking care of the shooting victims, who lay sprawled on the floor from the cafeteria to the gymnasium, a bloody trail that chronicled the shooter’s movements.

The fire alarms were still ringing, and the safety sprinklers had created a running river in the hallway. Beneath the spray, two EMTs bent over a girl who’d been shot in the right shoulder. “Let’s get her on a sled,” the medic said.

Patrick knew her, he realized, and a shudder went through his body. She worked at the video store in town. Last weekend, when he’d rented Dirty Harry, she’d told him that he still had a late charge of $3.40. He saw her every Friday night when he rented a DVD, but he’d never asked her name. Why the hell hadn’t he asked?

As the girl whimpered, the medic took the Sharpie marker he was holding and wrote “9” on her forehead. “We don’t have IDs on all of the wounded,” he told Patrick. “So we’ve started numbering them.” As the student was shifted onto a backboard, Patrick reached across her for a yellow plastic shock blanket-one every officer carried in the back of his cruiser. He ripped it into quarters, glanced at the number on the girl’s forehead, and wrote a matching “9” on one of the squares. “Leave this in her place,” he instructed. “That way we can figure out who she is later, and where she was found.”

An EMT stuck his head around the corner. “Hitchcock says all the beds are taken. We’ve got kids lined up on the front lawn waiting, but the ambulances have nowhere to go.”

“What about APD?”

“They’re full, too.”

“Then call Concord and tell them we’ve got buses coming in,” Patrick ordered. From the corner of his eye he saw an EMT he knew-an old-timer planning to retire in three months-walk away from a body and sink into a crouch, sobbing. Patrick grabbed the sleeve of a passing officer. “Jarvis, I need your help…”

“But you just assigned me to the gym, Captain.”

Patrick had divided up the responding officers and the major crimes unit of the state police so that each part of the high school had its own team of first responders. Now he handed Jarvis the remaining pieces of the plastic shock blanket and a black marker. “Forget the gym. I want you to do a circuit of the whole school and check in with the EMTs. Anyone who’s numbered gets a numbered blanket left in place when they’re transported.”

“I have one bleeding out in the girls’ room,” a voice called.

“I’m on it,” an EMT said, picking up a bag of supplies and hurrying away.

Make sure you haven’t forgotten anything, Patrick told himself. You only get to do this once. His head felt like it was made of glass, too heavy and too thin-walled to handle the weight of so much information. He could not be everywhere at once; he could not talk fast enough or think quickly enough to dispatch his men where they needed to be. He had no fucking idea how to process a nightmare this massive, and yet he had to pretend that he did, because everyone else was looking to him to be in charge.

The double doors of the cafeteria swung shut behind him. By now, the team working this room had assessed and transported the injured; only the bodies remained behind. The cinder-block walls were chipped where bullets had pierced or grazed them. A vending machine-glass shattered, bottles pierced-dribbled Sprite and Coke and Dasani onto the linoleum floor. One of the crime techs was photographing evidence: abandoned bookbags and purses and textbooks. He snapped each item close-up, then at a distance with a little yellow tented evidence marker to record its placement in relation to the rest of the scene. Another officer examined blood-spatter patterns. A third and a fourth were pointing to a spot in the upper right corner of the ceiling. “Captain,” one of them said, “looks like we’ve got a video.”

“Where’s the recorder?”

The officer shrugged. “Principal’s office?”

“Go find out,” Patrick said.

He walked down the main aisle of the cafeteria. It looked, at first glance, like a science fiction movie: everyone had been in the middle of eating and chatting and joking around with friends, and then in the blink of an eye, all the humans were abducted by aliens, leaving only the artifacts behind. What would an anthropologist say about the student body of Sterling High, based on the Wonder-bread sandwiches scarred by only one bite; the tub of Cherry Bomb lip gloss with a fingerprint still skimming the surface; the salt-and-pepper composition notebooks filled with study sheets on Aztec civilization and margin notes about the current one: I luv Zach S!!! Mr. Keifer is a Nazi!!!

Patrick’s knee bumped one of the tables, and a loose handful of grapes scattered like gasps. One bounced against the shoulder of a boy slumped over his binder, his blood soaking into the college-ruled paper. The boy’s hand still held tight to his eyeglasses. Had he been cleaning them when Peter Houghton arrived for his rampage? Had he taken them off because he didn’t want to see?

Patrick stepped over the bodies of two girls who lay sprawled on the floor like mirror twins, their miniskirts hiked high on their thighs and their eyes still open. Walking into the kitchen area, he surveyed the troughs of graying peas and carrots and the runny slop of chicken pot pie; the explosion of salt and pepper packets that dotted the floor like confetti. The shiny metallic helmets of the Yoplait yogurts-strawberry and mixed berry and key lime and peach-which were still miraculously aligned in four neat rows near the cash register, an unflinching, tiny army. One worn plastic tray, with a dish of Jell-O and a napkin on it, waiting to be served the rest of the meal.

Suddenly, Patrick heard a noise. Could he have been wrong-could they all have missed a second shooter? Could his team be canvassing the school for survivors…and still be at risk themselves?

He drew his gun and crept into the bowels of the kitchen, past racks with monstrous cans of tomato sauce and green beans and processed nacho cheese, past massive rolls of plastic wrap and Sysco tinfoil, to the refrigerated room where meats and produce were stored. Patrick kicked open the door, and cold air spilled over his legs. “Freeze,” he yelled, and for the briefest moment, before he remembered everything else, he nearly smiled.

A middle-aged Latina lunch lady, wearing a hair net that crawled over her forehead like a spiderweb, inched out from behind a rack of prepackaged bags of salad mix. Her hands were raised; she was shivering. “No me tire,” she sobbed.

Patrick lowered his weapon and took off his jacket, sliding it over the woman’s shoulders. “It’s over,” he soothed, although he knew this was not really true. For him, for Peter Houghton, for all of Sterling…it was only just beginning.

“Let me get this straight, Mrs. Calloway,” Alex said. “You are charged with driving recklessly and causing serious bodily injury while reaching down to aid a fish?”

The defendant, a fifty-four-year-old woman sporting a bad perm and an even worse pantsuit, nodded. “That’s correct, Your Honor.”

Alex leaned her elbows on the bench. “I’ve got to hear this.”

The woman looked at her attorney. “Mrs. Calloway was coming home from the pet store with a silver arowana,” the lawyer said.

“That’s a fifty-five-dollar tropical fish, Judge,” the defendant interjected.

“The plastic bag rolled off the passenger seat and popped. Mrs. Calloway reached down for the fish and that’s when…the unfortunate incident occurred.”

“By unfortunate incident,” Alex clarified, looking at her file, “you mean hitting a pedestrian.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

Alex turned to the defendant. “How’s the fish?”

Mrs. Calloway smiled. “Wonderful,” she said. “I named it Crash.”

From the corner of her eye, Alex saw a bailiff enter the courtroom and whisper to the clerk, who looked at Alex and nodded. He scrawled something on a piece of paper, and the bailiff walked it up to the bench.

Shots fired at Sterling High, she read.

Alex went still as stone. Josie. “Court’s adjourned,” she whispered, and then she ran.

John Eberhard gritted his teeth and concentrated on moving just one more inch forward. He could not see, with all the blood running down his face, and his left side was completely useless. He couldn’t hear, either-his ears still rang with the blast of the gun. Still, he had managed to crawl from the upstairs hallway where Peter Houghton had shot him into an art supply room.

He thought about the practices where Coach made them skate from goal line to goal line, faster and then faster still, until the players were gasping for breath and spitting onto the ice. He thought about how, when you felt you had nothing left to give, you’d find just one iota more. He dragged himself another foot, digging his elbow against the floor.

When John reached the metal shelving that held clay and paint and beads and wire, he tried to push himself upright, but a blinding pain speared his head. Minutes later-or was it hours?-he regained consciousness. He didn’t know if it was safe to check outside the closet yet. He was flat on his back, and something cold was drifting across his face. Wind. Coming through a crack in the seal of the window.

A window.

John thought of Courtney Ignatio: how she’d been sitting across from him at the cafeteria table when the glass wall behind her burst; how suddenly there had been a flower blooming in the middle of her chest, bright as a poppy. He thought of how a hundred screams, all at once, had braided into a rope of sound. He remembered teachers poking their heads out of their classrooms like gophers, and the looks on their faces when they heard the shots.

John pulled himself up on the shelves, one-handed, fighting the black buzz that told him he was going to faint again. By the time he was upright, leaning against the metal frame, he was shuddering. His vision was so blurred that when he took a can of paint and hurled it, he had to choose between two windows.

The glass shattered. Jackknifed on the ledge, he could see fire trucks and ambulances. Reporters and parents pushing at police tape. Clusters of sobbing students. Broken bodies, spaced like railroad ties on the snow. EMTs bringing out more of them.

Help, John Eberhard tried to scream, but he couldn’t form the word. He couldn’t form any words-not Look, not Stop, not even his own name.

“Hey,” someone called. “There’s a kid up there!”

Sobbing by now, John tried to wave, but his arm wouldn’t work.

People were starting to point. “Stay put,” a fireman yelled, and John tried to nod. But his body no longer belonged to him, and before he realized what had happened, that small movement pitched him out the window to land on the concrete two stories below.

Diana Leven, who had left her job as an assistant attorney general in Boston two years ago to join a department that was a little kinder and gentler, walked into the Sterling High gym and stopped beside the body of a boy who had fallen directly on the three-point line after being shot in the neck. The shoes of the crime scene techs squeaked on the shellacked floor as they took photographs and picked up shell casings, zipping them into plastic evidence bags. Directing them was Patrick Ducharme.

Diana looked around at the sheer volume of evidence-clothing, guns, blood spatter, spent rounds, dropped bookbags, lost sneakers-and realized that she was not the only one with a massive job ahead of her. “What do you know so far?”

“We think it’s a sole shooter. He’s in custody,” Patrick said. “We don’t know for sure whether anyone else was involved. The building’s secure.”

“How many dead?”

“Ten confirmed.”

Diana nodded. “Wounded?”

“Don’t know yet. We’ve got every ambulance in northern New Hampshire here.”

“What can I do?”

Patrick turned to her. “Put on a show and get rid of the cameras.”

She started to walk off, but Patrick grabbed her arm. “You want me to talk to him?”

“The shooter?”

Patrick nodded.

“It may be the only chance we have to get to him before he has a lawyer. If you think you can get away from here, do it.” Diana hurried out of the gymnasium and downstairs, careful to skirt the work of the policemen and the medics. The minute she walked outside, the media attached themselves to her, their questions stinging like bees. How many victims? What are the names of the dead? Who is the shooter?

Why?

Diana took a deep breath and smoothed her dark hair back from her face. This was her least favorite part of the job-being the spokeswoman on camera. Although more vans would arrive as the day went on, right now it was only local New Hampshire media-affiliates for CBS and ABC and FOX. She might as well enjoy the hometown advantage while she could. “My name is Diana Leven, and I’m with the attorney general’s office. We can’t release any information now because there’s an investigation still pending, but we promise to give you details as soon as we can. What I can tell you right now is that this morning, there was a school shooting at Sterling High. It’s unclear as to who the perpetrator or perpetrators were. One person has been remanded into custody. There are no formal charges yet.”

A reporter pushed her way to the front of the pack. “How many kids are dead?”

“We don’t have that information yet.”

“How many were hit?”

“We don’t have that information yet,” Diana repeated. “We’ll keep you posted.”

“When are charges going to be filed?” another journalist shouted.

“What can you tell the parents who want to know if their kids are okay?”

Diana pressed her mouth into a firm line and prepared to run the gauntlet. “Thank you very much,” she said, not an answer at all.

Lacy had to park six blocks away from the school; that’s how crowded it had become. She took off at a dead run, holding the blankets that the local radio announcers had urged people to bring for the shock victims. I’ve already lost one son, she thought. I can’t lose another.

The last conversation she had had with Peter had been an argument. It was before he went to bed the previous night, before she’d been called into a delivery. I asked you to take out the trash, she had said. Yesterday. Don’t you hear me when I talk to you, Peter?

Peter had glanced up at her over his computer screen. What?

What if that turned out to be the final exchange between them?

Nothing Lacy had seen in nursing school or in her work at a hospital prepared her for the sight she faced when she turned the corner. She processed it in pieces: shattered glass, fire engines, smoke. Blood, sobbing, sirens. She dropped the blankets near an ambulance and swam into a sea of confusion, bobbing along with the other parents in the hope that she might catch her lost child drifting before being overwhelmed by the tide.

There were children running across the muddy courtyard. None of them had coats on. Lacy watched one lucky mother find her daughter, and she scanned the crowd wildly, looking for Peter, aware that she didn’t even know what he was wearing today.

Snippets of sound floated toward her:

…didn’t see him

……Mr. McCabe got shot…

…haven’t found her yet…

…I thought I’d never…

…lost my cell phone when…

…Peter Houghton was…

Lacy spun around, her eyes focusing on the girl who was speaking-the one who’d been reunited with her mother. “Excuse me,” Lacy said. “My son…I’m trying to find him. I heard you mention his name-Peter Houghton?”

The girl’s eyes rounded, and she sidled closer to her mother. “He’s the one who’s shooting.”

Everything around Lacy slowed-the pulse of the ambulances, the pace of the running students, the round sounds that fell from the lips of this girl. Maybe she had misheard.

She glanced up at the girl again, and immediately wished she hadn’t. The girl was sobbing. Over her shoulder her mother stared at Lacy with horror, and then carefully pivoted to shield her daughter from view, as if Lacy were a basilisk-as if her very stare could turn you to stone.

There must be some mistake, please let there be a mistake, she thought, even as she looked around at the carnage and felt Peter’s name swell like a sob in her throat.

Woodenly, she approached the closest policeman. “I’m looking for my son,” Lacy said.

“Lady, you’re not the only one. We’re doing our best to-”

Lacy took a deep breath, aware that from this moment on, everything would be different. “His name,” she said, “is Peter Houghton.”

Alex’s high heel twisted in a crack in the sidewalk, and she went down hard on one knee. Struggling upright again, she grabbed at the arm of a mother who was running past her. “The names of the wounded…where are they?”

“Posted at the hockey rink.”

Alex hurried across the street, which had been blocked off to cars and was now a triage area for the medical personnel loading students into ambulances. When her shoes slowed her down-they were designed for an indoor courthouse, not running around outside-she reached down and stepped out of them, running in her stockings down the wet pavement.

The hockey rink, which was shared by both the Sterling High School team and the college players, was a five-minute walk from the school. Alex reached it in two minutes and found herself being pushed forward by a throng of parents all determined to see the handwritten lists that had been taped to the door panels, lists of the children who’d been taken to area hospitals. There was no indication of how badly they’d been hurt…or worse. Alex read the first three names: Whitaker Obermeyer. Kaitlyn Harvey. Matthew Royston.

Matt?

“No,” a woman beside her said. She was petite, with the dark darting eyes of a bird and a froth of red hair. “No,” she repeated, but this time, the tears had already begun.

Alex stared at her, unable to offer comfort, out of fear that grief might be contagious. She was suddenly shoved hard from the left and found herself now standing in front of the list of wounded who’d been taken to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.