lexis, Emma.

Horuka, Min.

Pryce, Brady.

Cormier, Josephine.

Alex would have fallen if not for the press of anxious parents on either side of her. “Excuse me,” she murmured, giving up her place to another frantic mother. She struggled through the growing crowd. “Excuse me,” Alex said again, words that were no longer polite discourse, but a plea for absolution.

“Captain,” a desk sergeant said as Patrick walked into the station, and he slid his eyes toward the woman who was waiting across the room, coiled tight with purpose. “That’s her.”

Patrick turned. Peter Houghton’s mother was tiny and looked nothing like her son. She had a pile of dark curls twisted on top of her head and secured with a pen. She wore scrubs and a pair of Merrell clogs. He wondered, briefly, if she was a doctor. He thought about the irony of that: First, do no harm.

She didn’t look like a person who’d created a monster, although Patrick realized she might have been caught just as unaware by her son’s actions as the rest of the community. “Mrs. Houghton?”

“I want to see my son.”

“Unfortunately, you can’t,” Patrick replied. “He’s being held in custody.”

“He has a lawyer.”

“Your son is seventeen-legally, an adult. That means that Peter’s going to have to invoke his right to an attorney himself.”

“But he might not know…” she said, her voice breaking. “He might not know that’s what he needs to do.”

Patrick knew that, in a different way, this woman was a victim of her son’s actions, too. He had interrogated enough parents of minors to know that the last thing you ever wanted to do was burn a bridge. “Ma’am, we’re doing our best to understand what happened today. And honestly, I hope you’ll be willing to talk to me later-to help me figure out what Peter was thinking.” He hesitated, and then added, “I’m very sorry.”

He let himself into the inner sanctum of the police station with his keys and jogged up the stairs to the booking room with its adjacent lockup. Peter Houghton sat on the floor with his back to the bars, rocking slowly.

“Peter,” Patrick said. “You all right?”

Slowly, the boy turned his head. He stared at Patrick.

“You remember me?”

Peter nodded.

“How’d you like a cup of coffee or something?”

A hesitation, and then Peter nodded again.

Patrick summoned the sergeant to open Peter’s cell and led him to the kitchen. He’d already arranged to have a camcorder running, so that if it came down to it, he could get Peter’s verbal consent to his rights on tape and then get him to talk. Inside, he invited Peter to take a seat at the scarred table, and he poured two cups of coffee. He didn’t ask Peter how he liked it-just added sugar and milk and set it in front of the boy.

Patrick sat down, too. He hadn’t gotten a good look at the boy before-adrenaline will do that to your vision-but now he stared. Peter Houghton was slight, pale, with wire-rimmed glasses and freckles. One of his front teeth was crooked, and his Adam’s apple looked fist-sized. His knuckles were knotty and chapped. He was crying quietly, and it might have been enough to engender sympathy had he not been wearing a T-shirt splattered with the blood of other students.

“You feel all right, Peter?” Patrick asked. “You hungry?”

The boy shook his head.

“Can I get you anything else?”

Peter put his head down on the table. “I want my mom,” he whispered.

Patrick looked at the part in the boy’s hair. Had he brushed it that morning, thinking, Today’s the day I’m going to kill ten students? “I’d like to talk about what happened today. Would you be willing to do that?”

Peter didn’t answer.

“If you explain it to me,” Patrick urged, “maybe I can explain it to everyone else.”

Peter lifted his face, crying in earnest now. Patrick knew this wasn’t going to go anywhere; he sighed, pushing away from the table. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Patrick led Peter back to the holding cell and watched him curl up on the floor on his side, facing the cement wall. He knelt behind the boy, one last-ditch attempt. “Help me help you,” he said, but Peter just shook his head and continued to cry.

It wasn’t until Patrick had stepped out of the cell and turned the key in the lock that he heard Peter speak again. “They started it,” he whispered.

Dr. Guenther Frankenstein had worked as the state medical examiner for six years, which was exactly how long he’d held the Mr. Universe title in the early 1970s, before he traded in his barbells for a scalpel-or as he liked to put it, went from building bodies to taking them apart. His muscles were still formidable, and visible enough beneath his jacket to stop the onslaught of any monster jokes incurred by his last name. Patrick liked Guenther-how could you not admire a guy who could lift three times his body weight and yet also know, just by eyeballing a liver, roughly how many grams it would weigh?

Every now and then Patrick and Guenther would grab a few beers together, consuming enough alcohol for the former bodybuilder to tell him stories of women offering to oil him up before a competition or good anecdotes about Arnold, before he became political. Today, however, Patrick and Guenther did not joke around, and they did not talk about the past. They were overwhelmed by the present as they moved silently through the halls, cataloguing the dead.

Patrick met Guenther at the school after his abortive interview with Peter Houghton. The prosecutor had only shrugged when Patrick told her Peter hadn’t been willing or able to talk. “We have hundreds of witnesses saying he killed ten people,” Diana had said. “Arrest him.”

Guenther crouched down beside the body of the sixth casualty. She had been shot in the girls’ bathroom, and her body was sprawled facedown in front of the sinks. Patrick turned to the principal, Arthur McAllister, who’d agreed to accompany them for identification. “Kaitlyn Harvey,” the principal said, his voice haunted. “Special-needs kid…sweet girl.”

Guenther and Patrick looked at each other. The principal did not just identify the bodies; he also gave a little one-or two-sentence eulogy each time. Patrick supposed that the man couldn’t help himself-unlike Patrick and Guenther, he wasn’t used to dealing with tragedy in the course of his normal occupation.

Patrick had tried to retrace Peter’s footsteps, from the front hallway to the cafeteria (Victims 1 and 2: Courtney Ignatio and Maddie Shaw), to the stairwell outside it (Victim 3: Whit Obermeyer), to the boys’ bathroom (Victim 4: Topher McPhee), through another hallway (Victim 5: Grace Murtaugh), into the girls’ bathroom (Victim 6: Kaitlyn Harvey). Now, as he led the team upstairs, he took a left into the first classroom, trailing a smeared line of blood to a spot near the chalkboard where the body of the only adult victim lay…and beside him, a young man with his hand pressed tight over the bullet wound in the man’s belly. “Ben?” McAllister said. “What are you still doing here?”

Patrick turned to the boy. “You’re not an EMT?”

“I…no…”

“You told me you were an EMT!”

“I said I’d had medical training!”

“Ben’s an Eagle Scout,” the principal said.

“I couldn’t leave Mr. McCabe. I…applied pressure, and it’s working, see? The blood’s stopped.”

Guenther gently removed the boy’s bloody hand from his teacher’s stomach. “That’s because he’s gone, son.”

Ben’s face crumpled. “But I…I…”

“You did the best you could,” Guenther assured him.

Patrick turned to the principal. “Why don’t you take Ben outside…maybe let one of the doctors take a look at him?” Shock, he mouthed over the boy’s head.

As they left the classroom, Ben grasped the principal’s sleeve, leaving a bright red handprint behind. “Jesus,” Patrick said, running a hand down his face.

Guenther stood up. “Come on. Let’s just get this over with.”

They walked toward the gymnasium, where Guenther certified the deaths of two more students-a black boy and a white one-and then into the locker room where Patrick had ultimately cornered Peter Houghton. Guenther examined the body of the boy Patrick had seen earlier, the kid in the hockey jersey whose cap had been blown off his head by a bullet. Meanwhile, Patrick walked into the abutting shower room and glanced out the window. The reporters were still there, but most of the wounded had been dealt with. There was only one waiting ambulance, instead of seven.

It had started to rain. By the next morning, the bloodstains on the pavement outside the school would be pale; this day might never have happened.

“This is interesting,” Guenther said.

Patrick closed the window against the weather. “Why? Is he deader than the rest of them?”

“Yeah. He’s the only victim that’s been shot twice. Once in the gut, once in the head.” Guenther looked at him. “How many guns did you find on the shooter?”

“One in his hand, one on the floor here, two in his backpack.”

“Nothing like a little backup plan.”

“Tell me about it,” Patrick said. “Can you tell which bullet was fired first?”

“No. My educated guess, though, would be the one in the belly…since it was the slug to the brain that killed him.” Guenther knelt beside the body. “Maybe he hated this kid most of all.”

The door of the locker room flew open, revealing a street cop soaked by the sudden downpour. “Captain?” he said. “We just found the makings of another pipe bomb in Peter Houghton’s car.”

When Josie was younger, Alex had a recurring nightmare about being on a plane when it went into a nosedive. She could feel the spin of gravity, the pressure that held her back in her chair; she saw purses and coats and carry-on luggage burst out of the overhead compartments to fall into the aisle. I have to get to my cell phone, Alex had thought, intent on leaving Josie a message on the answering machine that she could carry around forever, digital proof that Alex loved her and was thinking of her at the end. But even after Alex had grabbed her phone from her purse and turned it on, it took too long. She’d hit the ground when the phone was still searching for a signal.

She’d awaken shaking and sweaty, even as she dismissed the dream: she rarely traveled apart from Josie; she certainly didn’t take flights for her job. She’d throw back the covers and head to the bathroom and splash water on her face, but it didn’t stop her from thinking: I was too late.

Now, as she sat in the quiet dark of a hospital room where her daughter was sleeping off the effects of a sedative given to her by the admitting doctor, Alex felt the same way.

This is what Alex had managed to learn: Josie had fainted during the shooting. She had a cut on her forehead decorated with a butterfly bandage, and a mild concussion. The doctors wanted to keep her overnight for observation, to be safe.

Safe had a whole new definition now.

Alex had also learned, from the unending news coverage, the names of the dead. One of whom was Matthew Royston.

Matt.

What if Josie had been with her boyfriend when he was shot?

Josie had been unconscious the whole time Alex had been here. She was small and still under the faded hospital sheets; the tie at the neck of her hospital johnny had come unraveled. From time to time, her right hand twitched. Alex reached out now and grasped it. Wake up, she thought. Prove to me you’re okay.

What if Alex hadn’t been late to work that morning? Might she have stayed at the kitchen table with Josie, talking about the things she imagined mothers and daughters discussed but that she never seemed to have the time to? What if she’d taken a better look at Josie when she hurried downstairs, told her to go back to bed and get some rest?

What if she’d taken Josie on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Punta Cana, San Diego, Fiji-all the places Alex dream-surfed on her computer in chambers and thought about visiting, but never did?

What if she’d been a prescient enough mother to keep her daughter home from school today?

There were, of course, hundreds of other parents who’d made the same honest mistake she had. But that was shallow comfort to Alex: none of their children were Josie. None of them, surely, had as much to lose as she did.

When this is over, Alex promised silently, we will go to the rain forest, or the pyramids, or a beach as white as bone. We will eat grapes from the vine, we will swim with sea turtles, we will walk miles on cobblestone streets. We will laugh and talk and confess. We will.

At the same time, a small voice in her head was scheduling this paradise. After, it said. Because first, this trial will come to your courtroom.

It was true: a case like this would be fast-tracked to the docket. Alex was the superior court judge for Grafton County, and would be for the next eight months. Although Josie had been at the scene of the crime, she wasn’t technically a victim of the shooter. Had Josie been wounded, Alex would have automatically been removed from the case. But as it stood, there was no legal conflict in Alex’s sitting as judge, as long as she could separate her personal feelings as the mother of a high school student from her professional feelings as a justice. This would be her first big trial as a superior court judge, the one that set a tone for the rest of her tenure on the bench.

Not that she was really thinking about that now.

Suddenly, Josie stirred. Alex watched consciousness pour into her, reach a high-water mark. “Where am I?”

Alex combed her fingers through her daughter’s hair. “In the hospital.”

“Why?”

Her hand stilled. “Do you remember anything about today?”

“Matt came over before school,” Josie said, and then she pushed herself upright. “Was there, like, a car accident?”

Alex hesitated, unsure of what she was supposed to say. Wasn’t Josie better off not knowing the truth? What if this was the way her mind was protecting her from whatever she’d witnessed?

“You’re fine,” Alex said carefully. “You weren’t hurt.”

Josie turned to her, relieved. “What about Matt?”

Lewis was getting a lawyer. Lacy held that nugget of information to her chest like a hot stone as she rocked back and forth on Peter’s bed and waited for him to come home. It’s going to be all right, Lewis had promised, although she did not understand how he could make so specious a statement. Clearly this is a mistake, Lewis had said, but he hadn’t been down at the high school. He hadn’t seen the faces of the students, kids who would never really be kids again.

There was a part of Lacy that wanted so badly to believe Lewis-to think that somehow, this broken thing might be fixed. But there was another part of her that remembered him waking Peter at four in the morning to go out and sit in a duck blind. Lewis had taught his son how to hunt, never expecting that Peter might find a different kind of prey. Lacy understood hunting as both a sport and an evolutionary claim; she even knew how to make an excellent venison stew and teriyaki goose and enjoyed whatever meal Lewis’s hobby put on the table. But right now, she thought, It is his fault, because then it couldn’t be hers.

How could you change a boy’s bedding every week and feed him breakfast and drive him to the orthodontist and not know him at all? She’d assumed that if Peter’s answers were monosyllabic, it was just because of his age; that any mother would have made the same assumption. Lacy combed through her memories for some red flag, some conversation she might have misread, something overlooked, but all she could recall were a thousand ordinary moments.

A thousand ordinary moments that some mothers would never get to have again with their own children.

Tears sprang to her eyes; she wiped them with the back of her hand. Don’t think about them, she silently scolded. Right now you have to worry about yourself.

Had Peter been thinking that, too?

Swallowing, Lacy walked into her son’s room. It was dark, the bed neatly made just as Lacy had left it this morning, but now she saw the poster of a band called Death Wish on the wall and wondered why a boy might hang it up. She opened the closet and saw the empty bottles and electrical tape and torn rags and everything else she had missed the first time around.

Suddenly, Lacy stopped. She could fix this herself. She could fix this for both of them. She ran downstairs to the kitchen and ripped three large black thirty-three-gallon trash bags free from their coil before hurrying back to Peter’s room. She started in the closet, shoving packages of shoelaces, sugar, potassium nitrate fertilizer, and-my God, were these pipes?-into the first bag. She did not have a plan about what she would do with all these things, but she would get them out of her house.

When the doorbell rang, Lacy sighed with relief, expecting Lewis-although, if she’d been thinking clearly, she would have realized that Lewis would have simply let himself in. She abandoned her haul and went downstairs to find a policeman holding a slim blue folder. “Mrs. Houghton?” the officer said.

What could they possibly want? They already had her son.

“We’ve got a search warrant.” He handed her the paperwork and pushed past her, followed by five other policemen. “Jackson and Walhorne, you head up to the boy’s room. Rodriguez, the basement. Tewes and Gilchrist, start with the first floor, and everyone, let’s make sure you cover the answering machines and all computer equipment…” Then he noticed Lacy still standing there, stricken. “Mrs. Houghton, you’ll have to leave the premises.”

The policeman escorted her to her own front hallway. Numb, Lacy followed. What would they think when they reached Peter’s room and found that trash bag? Would they blame Peter? Or Lacy, for enabling him?

Did they already?

A rush of cold air hit Lacy in the face as the front door opened. “For how long?”

The officer shrugged. “Till we’re done,” he said, and he left her out in the cold.

Jordan McAfee had been an attorney for nearly twenty years and truly believed he had seen and heard it all, until now, when he and his wife, Selena, stood in front of the television set watching CNN’s coverage of the school shooting at Sterling High. “It’s like Columbine,” Selena said. “In our backyard.”

“Except right now,” Jordan murmured, “there’s someone to blame who’s still alive.” He glanced down at the baby in his wife’s arms, a blue-eyed, coffee-colored mixture of his own WASP genes and Selena’s never-ending limbs and ebony skin, and he reached for the remote to turn down the volume, just in case his son was taking any of this in subconsciously.

Jordan knew Sterling High. It was just down the street from his barber and two blocks away from the room over the bank he rented as his law office. He had represented a few students who’d been busted with pot in their glove compartments or who got caught drinking underage at the college in town. Selena, who was not only his wife but also his investigator, had gone into the school to talk to kids from time to time about a case.

They hadn’t lived here very long. His son Thomas-the only good thing to come out of his lousy first marriage-graduated from high school in Salem Falls and was now a sophomore at Yale, where Jordan spent $40,000 a year to hear that he had narrowed down his career plans to becoming either a performance artist, an art historian, or a professional clown. Jordan had finally asked Selena to marry him, and after she’d gotten pregnant, they’d moved to Sterling-because the school district had such a good reputation.

Go figure.

When the telephone rang and Jordan-who didn’t want to watch the coverage but couldn’t tear his eyes away from it either-made no motion to answer it, Selena dumped the baby in his arms and reached for the receiver. “Hey,” she said. “How’s it going?”

Jordan glanced up and raised his brows.

Thomas, Selena mouthed. “Yeah, hang on, he’s right here.”

He took the phone from Selena. “What the hell is going on?” Thomas asked. “Sterling High’s all over MSNBC.com.”

“I don’t know any more than you do,” Jordan said. “It’s pandemonium.”

“I know some kids there. We competed against them in track and field. It’s just-it’s not real.”

Jordan could still hear ambulance sirens in the distance. “It’s real,” he said. There was a click on the line-call-waiting. “Hang on, I have to take this.”

“Is this Mr. McAfee?”

“Yes…”

“I, um, understand that you’re an attorney. I got your name from Stuart McBride over at Sterling College…”

On the television, a list of the names of the known dead began to scroll, with yearbook pictures. “You know, I’m on the other line,” Jordan said. “Could I take down your name and number, and get back to you?”

“I was wondering if you’d represent my son,” the caller said. “He’s the boy who…the one from the high school who…” The voice stumbled, and then broke. “They say my son’s the one who did it.”

Jordan thought of the last time he’d represented a teenage boy. Like this one, Chris Harte had been found holding a smoking gun.

“Will you…will you take his case?”

Jordan forgot about Thomas, waiting. He forgot about Chris Harte and how the case had nearly turned him inside out. Instead he looked at Selena and the baby in her arms. Sam twisted, grabbing at her earring. This boy-the one who had walked into Sterling High this morning and committed a massacre-was someone’s son. And in spite of a town that would be reeling for years, and media coverage that had already reached the point of saturation, he deserved a fair trial.

“Yes,” Jordan said. “I will.”

Finally-after the bomb squad had dismantled the pipe bomb in Peter Houghton’s car; after one hundred and sixteen shell casings had been found scattered in the school from fired bullets; after the accident recon guys had begun to measure the evidence and the location of the bodies so that they could produce a scale diagram of the scene; after the crime techs had taken the first of hundreds of snapshots that they would put into indexed photo-books-Patrick called everyone together into the auditorium of the school and stood on the stage in the near darkness. “What we have is a massive amount of information,” he told the crowd assembled before him. “There’s going to be a lot of pressure on us to do this fast, and to do this right. I want everyone back here in twenty-four hours, so that we can see where we’re at.”

People began to disperse. At the next meeting, Patrick would be given the completed photo-books, all evidence not being sent to the lab, and all lab submissions. In twenty-four hours, he’d be buried so far underneath the avalanche he wouldn’t know which way was up.

While the others headed back to various parts of the building to complete the work that would take them all night and the next day, Patrick walked out to his car. It had stopped raining. Patrick planned to go back to the station to review the evidence that had been seized from the Houghtons’ home, and he wanted to talk to the parents, if they were still willing. But he found himself pointing his car instead toward the medical center, and he pulled into the parking lot. He walked into the emergency entrance and flashed his badge. “Look,” he said to the nurse, “I know you had a lot of kids come through here today. But one of the first was a girl named Josie. I’m trying to find her.”

The nurse fluttered her hands over her computer keyboard. “Josie who?”

“That’s the thing,” Patrick admitted. “I don’t know.”

The screen swam with a flurry of information, and the nurse tapped her finger against the glass. “Cormier. She’s up on the fourth floor, Room 422.”

Patrick thanked her and took the elevator upstairs. Cormier. The name sounded familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it. It was common enough, he figured-maybe he’d read it in the paper or seen it on a television show. He slipped past the nurses’ desk and followed the numbers down the hall. The door to Josie’s room was ajar. The girl sat up in bed, wrapped in shadows, talking to a figure that stood beside her.

Patrick knocked softly and stepped into the room. Josie stared at him blankly; the woman beside her turned around.

Cormier, Patrick realized. As in Judge Cormier. He’d been called to testify in her courtroom a few times before she became a superior court judge; he’d gone to her for warrants as a last resort-after all, she came from a public defender’s background, which in Patrick’s mind meant that even if she now was scrupulously fair, she still had once played for the other side.

“Your Honor,” he said. “I didn’t realize Josie was your daughter.” He approached the bed. “How are you doing?”

Josie stared at him. “Do I know you?”

“I’m the one who carried you out-” He stopped as the judge put her hand on his arm and drew him out of Josie’s range of hearing.

“She doesn’t remember anything that happened,” the judge whispered. “She thinks for some reason that she was in a car accident…and I…” Her voice trailed off. “I haven’t been able to tell her the truth.”

Patrick understood-when you loved someone, you didn’t want to be the one who brought their world crashing down. “Would you like me to do it?”

The judge hesitated, and then nodded gratefully. Patrick faced Josie again. “You all right?”

“My head hurts. The doctors said I have a concussion and have to stay overnight.” She looked up at him. “I guess I ought to thank you for rescuing me.” Suddenly, a flicker of intention crossed her face. “Do you know what happened to Matt? The guy who was in the car with me?”

Patrick sat down on the edge of the hospital bed. “Josie,” he said gently, “you weren’t in a car accident. There was an incident at your school-a student came in and started shooting people.”

Josie shook her head, trying to dislodge the words.

“Matt was one of the victims.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Is he okay?”

Patrick looked down at the soft waffle weave of the blanket between them. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Josie said. “No. You’re lying to me.” She struck out at Patrick, clipping him across the face and chest. The judge rushed forward, trying to hold her daughter back, but Josie was wild-shrieking, crying, clawing, drawing the attention of the nursing staff down the hall. Two of them flew into the room on white wings, shooing out Patrick and Judge Cormier, while they administered a sedative to Josie.

In the hallway, Patrick leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. Jesus Christ. Was this what he’d have to put every one of his witnesses through? He was about to apologize to the judge for upsetting Josie when she turned on him just like her daughter had. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, telling her about Matt!”

“You asked me to,” Patrick bristled.

“To tell her about the school,” the judge qualified. “Not to tell her her boyfriend’s dead!”

“You know damn well Josie would have found out sooner or-”

“Later,” the judge interrupted. “Much later.”

The nurses appeared in the doorway. “She’s sleeping now,” one of them whispered. “We’ll be back in to check on her.”

They both waited until the nurses were out of hearing range. “Look,” Patrick said tightly. “Today I saw kids who’d been shot in the head, kids who will never walk again, kids who died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Your daughter…she’s in shock…but she’s one of the lucky ones.”

His words hit her, a solid slap. For just a moment, when Patrick looked at the judge, she no longer seemed furious. Her gray eyes were heavy with all the scenarios that, thankfully, had not come to pass; her mouth softened with relief. And then, just as suddenly, her features smoothed, impassive. “I’m sorry. I’m not usually like this. It’s just…been a really awful day.”

Patrick tried, but he could see no trace left of the emotion that had, for a moment, broken her. Seamless. That’s what she was.

“I know you were only trying to do your job,” the judge said.

“I would like to talk to Josie…but that’s not why I came. I’m here because she was the first one…well, I just needed to know she was all right.” He offered Judge Cormier the smallest of smiles, the kind that can start a heart to breaking. “Take care of her,” Patrick said, and then he turned and walked down the hall, aware of the heat of her gaze on his back, and how much it felt like the touch of a hand.

Twelve Years Before

On his first day of kindergarten, Peter Houghton woke up at 4:32 a.m. He padded into his parents’ room and asked if it was time yet to take the school bus. For as long as he could remember, he’d watched his brother Joey get on the bus, and it was a mystery of dynamic proportion: the way the sun bounced off its snub yellow nose, the door that hinged like the jaw of a dragon, the dramatic sigh when it came to a stop. Peter had a Matchbox car that looked just like the bus Joey rode on twice a day-the same bus that now he was going to get to ride on, too.

His mother told him to go back to sleep until it was morning, but he couldn’t. Instead, he got dressed in the special clothes his mother had bought for his first day of school and he lay back down in bed to wait. He was the first one downstairs for breakfast, and his mother made chocolate chip pancakes-his favorite. She kissed him on the cheek and took a picture of him sitting at the breakfast table, and then another one when he was dressed in his coat and had his empty knapsack on his back, like the shell of a turtle. “I can’t believe my baby is going to school,” his mother said.

Joey, who was in first grade this year, told him to stop acting stupid. “It’s just school,” he said. “Big deal.”

Peter’s mother finished buttoning his coat. “It was a big deal to you once, too,” she said. Then she told Peter she had a surprise for him. She went into the kitchen and reappeared with a Superman lunch box. Superman was reaching forward, as if he were trying to break out of the metal. His whole body stuck out from the background the tiniest bit, like the letters on books blind people read. Peter liked thinking that even if he couldn’t see, he would be able to tell that this was his lunch box. He took it from his mother and hugged her. He heard the thud of a piece of fruit rolling, the crinkle of wax paper, and he imagined the insides of his lunch, like mysterious organs.

They waited at the end of the driveway, and just as Peter had dreamed over and over, the yellow bus rose over the crest of the hill. “One more!” his mother called, and she took a picture of Peter with the bus groaning to a stop behind him. “Joey,” she instructed, “take care of your brother.” Then she kissed Peter on the forehead. “My big boy,” she said, and her mouth pinched tight, the way it did when she was trying not to cry.

Suddenly Peter felt his stomach turn to ice. What if kindergarten was not as great as he’d imagined? What if his teacher looked like the witch on that TV program that gave him nightmares sometimes? What if he forgot which direction the letter E went and everyone made fun of him?

With hesitation, he climbed the steps of the school bus. The driver wore an army jacket and had two teeth missing in the front. “There’s seats in back,” he said, and Peter headed down the aisle, looking for Joey.

His brother was sitting next to a boy Peter didn’t know. Joey glanced at him as he walked by, but didn’t say anything.

“Peter!”

He turned and saw Josie patting the empty seat next to her. She had her dark hair in pigtails and was wearing a skirt, even though she hated skirts. “I saved it for you,” Josie said.

He sat down next to her, feeling better already. He was riding inside a bus. And he was sitting next to his best friend in the whole world. “Cool lunch box,” Josie said.

He held it up, to show her the way that you could make Superman look like he was moving if you wiggled it, and just then a hand reached across the aisle. A boy with ape arms and a backward baseball cap grabbed the lunch box out of Peter’s grasp. “Hey, freak,” he said, “you want to see Superman fly?”

Before Peter understood what the older boy was doing, he opened a window and hurled Peter’s lunch box out of it. Peter stood up, craning his neck around to see out the rear emergency door. His lunch box burst open on the asphalt. His apple rolled across the dotted yellow line of the road and vanished beneath the tire of an oncoming car.

“Sit down!” the bus driver yelled.

Peter sank back into his seat. His face felt cold, but his ears were burning. He could hear the boy and his friends laughing, as loud as if it were happening in his own head. Then he felt Josie’s hand slide into his. “I’ve got peanut butter,” she whispered. “We can share.”

Alex sat in the conference room at the jail, across from her newest client, Linus Froom. This morning, at 4:00 a.m., he’d dressed in black, pulled a ski mask over his head, and robbed an Irving gas station convenience store at gunpoint. When the police were called in after Linus ran off, they found a cell phone on the ground. It rang while the detective was sitting at his desk. “Dude,” the caller said. “This is my cell phone. Do you have it?” The detective said yes, and asked where he’d lost it. “At the Irving station, man. I was there, like, a half hour ago.” The detective suggested that they meet at the corner of Route 10 and Route 25A; he’d bring the cell phone.

Needless to say, Linus Froom showed up, and was arrested for robbery.

Alex looked at her client across the scarred table. Her daughter was at this moment having juice and cookies or story time or Advanced Crayoning or whatever else the first day of kindergarten consisted of, and she was stuck in a conference room at the county jail with a criminal too stupid to even be good at his craft. “It says here,” Alex said, perusing the police report, “that there was some contention when Detective Chisholm read you your rights?”

Linus lifted his gaze. He was a kid-only nineteen-with acne and a unibrow. “He thought I was dumb as shit.”

“He said this to you?”

“He asked me if I could read.”

All cops did; they were supposed to have the perp follow along with the Miranda rights. “And your response, apparently, was, ‘Hello, fucko, do I look like a moron?’”

Linus shrugged. “What was I supposed to say?”

Alex pinched the bridge of her nose. Her days in the public defender’s office were an exhausting blur of moments like this: a great amount of energy and time expended on behalf of someone who-a week, a month, a year later-would wind up sitting across from her again. And yet, what else was she qualified to do? This was the world she had chosen to inhabit.

Her beeper went off. Glancing at the number, she silenced it. “Linus, I think we’re going to have to plead this one out.”

She left Linus in the hands of a detention officer and ducked into the office of a secretary at the jail in order to borrow her phone. “Thank God,” Alex said when the person picked up on the other end. “You saved me from jumping out a second-story window at the jail.”

“You forgot, there are bars,” Whit Hobart said, laughing. “I used to think maybe they’d been installed not to keep the prisoners in, but to prevent their public defenders from running away when they realize how bad their cases are.”

Whit had been Alex’s boss when she’d joined the NH public defender’s office, but he had retired nine months ago. A legend in his own right, Whit had become the father she’d never had-one who, unlike her own, had praise for her instead of criticism. She wished Whit were here, now, instead of in some golf community on the seacoast. He’d take her out to lunch and tell her stories that made her realize every public defender had clients-and cases-like Linus. And then he’d somehow leave her with the bill and a renewed drive to get up and fight all over again.

“What are you doing up?” Alex said. “Early tee time?”

“Nah, damn gardener woke me with the leaf blower. What am I missing?”

“Nothing, really. Except the office isn’t the same without you. There’s a certain…energy missing.”

“Energy? You’re not becoming some New Age crystal-reading hack, are you, Al?”

Alex grinned. “No-”

“Good. Because that’s why I’m calling: I’ve got a job for you.”

“I already have a job. In fact, I have enough work for two jobs.”

“Three district courts in the area are posting a vacancy in the Bar News. You really ought to put your name in, Alex.”

“To be a judge?” She started to laugh. “Whit, what are you smoking these days?”

“You’d be good at it, Alex. You’re a fine decision maker. You’re even-tempered. You don’t let your emotions get in the way of your work. You have the defense perspective, so you understand the litigants. And you’ve always been an excellent trial attorney.” He hesitated. “Plus, it’s not too often that New Hampshire has a Democratic female governor picking a judge.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Alex said, “but I am so not the right person for that job.”

She knew, too, because her father had been a superior court justice. Alex could remember swinging around in his swivel chair, counting paper clips, running her thumbnail along the green felt surface of his spotless blotter to make a hatch-marked grid. She’d pick up the phone and talk to the dial tone. She’d pretend. And then inevitably her father would come in and berate her for disturbing a pencil or a file or-God forbid-himself.

On her belt, her beeper began to vibrate again. “Listen, I have to get to court. Maybe we can do lunch next week.”

“Judges’ hours are regular,” Whit added. “What time does Josie get home from school?”

“Whit-”

“Think about it,” he said, and then he hung up.

“Peter,” his mother sighed, “how could you possibly lose it again?” She skirted around his father, who was pouring himself a cup of coffee, and fished through the dark bowels of the pantry for a brown paper lunch sack.

Peter hated those sacks. The banana never could quite fit in, and the sandwich always got crushed. But what else was he supposed to do?

“What did he lose?” his father asked.

“His lunch box. For the third time this month.” His mother began to fill the brown bag-fruit and juice pack on the bottom, sandwich floating on top. She glanced at Peter, who was not eating his breakfast, but vivisecting his paper napkin with a knife. He had, so far, made the letters H and T. “If you procrastinate, you’re going to miss the bus.”

“You’ve got to start being responsible,” his father said.

When his father spoke, Peter pictured the words like smoke. They clouded up the room for a moment, but before you knew it, they’d be gone.

“For God’s sake, Lewis, he’s five.”

“I don’t remember Joey losing his lunch box three times during the first month of school.”

Peter sometimes watched his father playing soccer in the backyard with Joey. Their legs pumped like crazy pistons and gears-forward, backward, forward-as if they were doing a dance together with the ball caught between them. When Peter tried to join them, he got tangled up in his own frustration. The last time, he’d scored against himself by accident.

He looked over his shoulder at his parents. “I’m not Joey,” he said, and even though nobody answered, he could hear the reply: We know.

“Attorney Cormier?” Alex glanced up to find a former client standing in front of her desk, beaming from ear to ear.

It took her a moment to place him. Teddy MacDougal or MacDonald, something like that. She remembered the charge: simple assault domestic violence. He and his wife had gotten drunk and gone after each other. Alex had gotten him acquitted.

“I got somethin’ for ya,” Teddy said.

“I hope you didn’t buy me anything,” she answered, and she meant it-this was a man from the North Country who was so poor that the floor of his house was literally dirt and he stocked his freezer with the spoils of his own hunting. Alex was not a fan of hunting, but she understood that for some of her clients-like Teddy-it was not about sport, but survival. Which was exactly why a conviction for him would have been so devastating: it would have cost him his firearms.

“I didn’t buy it. Promise.” Teddy grinned. “It’s in my truck. Come on out.”

“Can’t you bring it in here?”

“Oh, no. No, can’t do that.”

Oh, excellent, Alex thought. What could he possibly have in his truck that he can’t bring in? She followed Teddy out to the parking lot and in the back of his pickup truck saw a huge, dead bear.

“This is for your freeza’,” he said.

“Teddy, this is enormous. You could eat it all winter.”

“Damn right. But I thoughta you.”

“Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. But I don’t, um, eat meat. And I wouldn’t want it to go to waste.” She touched his arm. “I really want you to have it.”

Teddy squinted into the sun. “All right.” He nodded at Alex, climbed into the cab of his truck, and bounced out of the parking lot as the bear thumped against the walls of the pickup bed.

“Alex!”

She turned to find her secretary standing in the doorway.

“A call from your daughter’s school just came in,” the secretary said. “Josie got sent to the principal’s office.”

Josie? In trouble at school? “For what?” Alex asked.

“She beat the crap out of a boy on the playground.”

Alex started toward her car. “Tell them I’m on my way.”

On the ride home, Alex stole glances at her daughter in the rearview mirror. Josie had gone to school this morning in a white cardigan and khaki pants; now that cardigan was streaked with dirt. There were twigs in her hair, which had fallen from its ponytail. The elbow of her sweater had a hole in it; her lip was still bleeding. And-here was the amazing thing-apparently, she’d fared better than the little boy she’d gone after.

“Come on,” Alex said, leading Josie upstairs to the bathroom. There, she peeled off her daughter’s shirt, washed her cuts, and covered them with Neosporin and Band-Aids. She sat down in front of Josie, on the bathmat that looked like it was made of Cookie Monster skin. “You want to talk about it?”

Josie’s lower lip quivered, and she started to cry. “It’s Peter,” she said. “Drew picks on him all the time and Peter gets hurt, so today I wanted it to be the other way around.”

“Aren’t there teachers on the playground?”

“Aides.”

“Well, you should have told them that Peter was getting teased. Beating up Drew only makes you just as bad as him in the first place.”

“We went to the aides,” Josie complained. “They told Drew and the other kids to leave Peter alone, but they never listen.”

“So,” Alex said, “you did what you thought was the best thing at the time?”

“Yeah. For Peter.”

“Imagine if you always did that. Let’s say you decided that you liked someone else’s coat better than yours, so you took it.”

“That would be stealing,” Josie said.

“Exactly. That’s why there are rules. You can’t break the rules, not even when it seems like everyone else is doing it. Because if you do-if we all do-then the whole world becomes a very scary place. One where coats get stolen and people get beat up on the playground. Instead of doing the best thing, we sometimes have to settle for the rightest thing.”

“What’s the difference?”

“The best thing is what you think should be done. The rightest thing is what needs to be done-when you think not just of you and how you feel, but also the extra stuff-who else is involved, and what’s happened before, and what the rules say.” She glanced at Josie. “Why didn’t Peter fight?”

“He thought he’d get in trouble.”

“I rest my case,” Alex said.

Josie’s eyelashes were spiked with tears. “Are you mad at me?”

Alex hesitated. “I’m angry at the aides for not paying attention when Peter was getting teased. And I’m not thrilled that you punched a boy in the nose. But I’m proud of you for wanting to defend your friend.” She kissed Josie on the forehead. “Go get some clothes that don’t have holes in them, Wonder Woman.”

When Josie scrambled off into her bedroom, Alex remained sitting on the bathroom floor. It struck her that dispensing justice was really more about being present and engaged than anything else-unlike those aides on the playground, for example. You could be firm without being bossy; you could make it a point to know the rules; you could take all evidence into consideration before coming to a conclusion.

Being a good judge, Alex realized, was not all that different from being a good mother.

She stood up, went downstairs, and picked up the phone. Whit answered on the third ring. “Okay,” she said. “Tell me what I have to do.”

The chair was too small beneath Lacy’s bottom; her knees did not fit under the desk; the colors on the walls were too bright. The teacher who sat across from her was so young that Lacy wondered if she could go home and drink a glass of wine without breaking any laws. “Mrs. Houghton,” the teacher said, “I wish I could give you a better explanation, but the fact is, some kids are simply magnets for teasing. Other children see a weakness, and they exploit it.”

“What’s Peter’s weakness?” she asked.

The teacher smiled. “I don’t see it as a weakness. He’s sensitive, and he’s sweet. But that means he’s far less likely to be running around with the other boys playing police chase than he is to be coloring in a corner with Josie. The other children in the class notice.”

Lacy remembered being in elementary school, not that much older than Peter, and raising chicks from an incubator. The six eggs had hatched, but one of the chicks was born with a gnarled leg. It was always the last to the feed tray and the water trough, and it was scrawnier and more tentative than its siblings. One day, while the class watched in horror, the maimed chick was pecked to death by the others.

“The behavior of these other boys is not being tolerated,” the teacher assured Lacy. “When we see it, we immediately send the child to the principal.” She opened her mouth as if she was about to say something, and then snapped it shut.

“What?”

The teacher looked down at the desk. “It’s just that, unfortunately, that response can have the opposite effect. The boys identify Peter as the reason they’re in trouble, and that perpetuates the cycle of violence.”

Lacy felt her face growing hot. “What are you doing, personally, to make sure this doesn’t happen again?”

She expected the teacher to talk about a time-out chair, or some retributive punishment that would be handed out if Peter was again taunted by the in crowd. But instead, the young woman said, “I’m showing Peter how to stand up for himself. If someone cuts him in the lunch line, or if he’s teased, to say something in return instead of just accepting it.”

Lacy blinked at her. “I…I can’t believe I’m hearing this. So if he gets shoved, he’s supposed to shove back? When his food gets knocked on the floor, he should reciprocate?”

“Of course not-”

“You’re telling me that for Peter to feel safe in school, he’s going to have to start acting like the boys who do this to him?”

“No, I’m telling you about the reality of grade school,” the teacher corrected. “Look, Mrs. Houghton. I can tell you what you want to hear. I can say that Peter is a wonderful child, which he is. I can tell you that the school will teach tolerance and will discipline the boys who’ve been making Peter’s life so miserable, and that this will be enough to stop it. But the sad fact is that if Peter wants it to end, he’s going to have to be part of the solution.”

Lacy looked down at her hands. They looked gargantuan on the surface of the tiny pupil’s desk. “Thank you. For your honesty.” She stood up carefully, because that is how it’s best to move in a world where you no longer fit.

She let herself out of the kindergarten classroom. Peter was waiting on a small wooden bench beneath the cubbies in the hall. It was her job as Peter’s mother to smooth the road in front of him so that he wouldn’t falter. But what if she couldn’t bulldoze on his behalf all the time? Is that what the teacher had been trying to tell her?

She squatted down in front of Peter and reached for his hands. “You know I love you, right?” Lacy said.

Peter nodded.

“You know I only want what’s best for you.”

“Yes,” Peter said.

“I know about the lunch boxes. I know what’s been going on with Drew. I heard about Josie punching him. I know the kinds of things he says to you.” Lacy felt her eyes fill with tears. “The next time it happens, you have to stick up for yourself. You have to, Peter, or I…I’m going to have to punish you.”

Life wasn’t fair. Lacy had been passed over for promotions, no matter how hard she’d worked. She’d seen mothers who’d taken meticulous care of themselves deliver stillborns, while crack addicts had healthy infants. She’d seen fourteen-year-olds dying of ovarian cancer before they ever got a chance to really live. You couldn’t fight the injustice of fate; you could only suffer it and hope that one day it might be different. But somehow, it was even more difficult to stomach on behalf of your child. It tore Lacy apart to have to be the one to pull back that curtain of innocence, so that Peter would see that no matter how much she loved him-no matter how much she had wanted this world to be perfect for him-it would always fall short.

Swallowing, she stared at Peter, trying to think of what she could do to spur him to self-defense, which punishment would make him change his behavior, even as it broke her heart to make him do just that. “If this happens again…no playdates with Josie for a month.”

She closed her eyes at the ultimatum. It was not the way she liked to parent, but apparently her usual advice-be kind, be polite, be what you want others to be-had done Peter no good. If a threat might make Peter roar, so loud that Drew and all those other awful children slunk away with their tails between their legs, then Lacy would do it.

She brushed Peter’s hair back from his face, watching the play of doubt cloud his features-and why shouldn’t it? His mother had certainly never given him a directive like this before. “He’s a bully. A jerk, in a tiny package. But he’ll grow up to be a bigger jerk, and you-you’re going to grow up to be someone incredible.” Lacy smiled widely at her son. “One day, Peter, everyone’s going to know your name.”

There were two swings out on the playground, and sometimes you had to wait your turn for them. When that happened, Peter would cross his fingers and hope that he got the one that hadn’t been swung around the top bar by a fifth grader, making it so that the seat was incredibly high off the ground and hard to get into. He was afraid he would fall off, trying to get on the swing, or, even more embarrassing, not even be able to hike himself up in the first place.

When he waited with Josie, she always took that swing. She pretended she liked it, but Peter realized she was only pretending she didn’t know how much he disliked it.

Today at recess, they weren’t swinging. Instead, they’d twisted the chains round and round until they were as knotted as a throat, and then they’d lift up their feet and go spinning. Peter would sometimes look back at the sky and imagine that he was flying.

When they stopped, his swing and Josie’s staggered against each other and their feet got all tangled. She laughed, and lightly locked their ankles together so that they were connected, a human chain link.

He turned to her. “I want people to like me,” he blurted out.

Josie tilted her head. “People do like you.”

Peter split his feet, disengaging them. “I meant people,” he said, “who aren’t you.”

The application to become a judge took Alex two full days to complete, and as she filled it out, a remarkable thing happened: she realized that she did actually want to be a judge. In spite of what she’d said to Whit, in spite of her earlier reservations, she was making the right decision for the right reasons.

When the Judicial Selection Commission called for an interview, they made it clear that such invitations were not extended to just anybody. That if Alex was being interviewed, she was being seriously considered for the position. The job of the commission was to give the governor a short list of candidates. Judicial commission interviews were conducted at the old governor’s mansion, Bridges House, in East Concord. They were staggered, and candidates entered through one entrance and left through another, presumably so that no one knew who else was up for the job.

The twelve members of the commission were lawyers, policemen, executive directors of victim’s advocacy organizations. They stared so hard at Alex that she expected her face to burst into flames. It did not help, either, that she had been up half the night with Josie, who’d awakened from a nightmare about a boa constrictor and refused to go back to sleep. Alex didn’t know who the other candidates were for this position, but she’d wager that they weren’t single moms who’d had to poke the radiator vents with a yardstick at 3:00 a.m. to prove that there weren’t any snakes hiding in the dark tunnels.

“I like the pace,” she said carefully, replying to a question. There were answers she was expected to give, she knew. The trick was to somehow imbue the stock phrases and anticipated responses with part of her personality. “I like the pressure of making a quick decision. I’m strong on the rules of evidence. I’ve been in courtrooms with justices who don’t do their homework in advance, and I know I won’t function that way.” She hesitated, looking around at the men and women, wondering if she should cultivate a persona like most of the other people who applied for judicial positions-and who’d come through the hallowed ranks of the prosecutorial office-or if she should be herself and allow the petticoat hem of her public defender background to peek out.

Oh, hell.

“I guess the reason I really want to be a judge is because I love the way a courtroom is an equal opportunity environment. When you come into it, for that brief amount of time, your case is the most important thing in the world, to everyone in that room. The system works for you. It doesn’t matter who you are, or where you’re from-your treatment will depend on the letter of the law, not on any socioeconomic variables.”

One of the commission members looked down at her notes. “What do you think makes a good judge, Ms. Cormier?”

Alex felt a bead of sweat run down between her shoulder blades. “Being patient but firm. Being in control but not being arrogant. Knowing the rules of evidence and the rules of a courtroom.” She paused. “This is probably not what you’re used to hearing, but I think a good judge probably is a whiz at tangrams.”

An older woman from a victim’s advocacy group blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“Tangrams. I’m a mom. My little girl, she’s five. And there’s this game she has where you’re given a geometric outline of a figure-a boat, a train, a bird-and you somehow construct it from a set of puzzle pieces: triangles and parallelograms-some bigger than others. It’s easy for a person with good spatial relations skills, because you really have to think outside the box. And being a judge is like that. You’ve got all of these competing factors-the parties involved, the victims, law enforcement, society, even precedent-and you somehow have to use them to solve the problem within a given framework.”

In the uncomfortable silence that followed, Alex turned her head and caught a glimpse through a window of the next interviewee arriving through the entrance vestibule. She blinked, certain she’d seen wrong, but you did not forget the silvered curls that you’d once run your fingers through; you did not put out of your mind the geography of cheekbones and jaw you’d traced with your own lips. Logan Rourke-her trial advocacy professor; her old lover; her daughter’s father-headed into the building and closed the door.

Apparently, he was a judicial candidate as well.

Alex drew in her breath, even more determined to win this position than she had been a moment ago. “Ms. Cormier?” the older woman said again, and Alex realized she’d missed her question the first time around.

“Yes. Sorry?”

“I asked how successful you are when you play tangrams.”

Alex met her gaze. “Ma’am,” she said, letting a broad smile escape, “I’m the New Hampshire State Champion.”

At first, the numbers just looked fatter. But then they started to twist a little, and Peter had to either squinch up his face or get closer to see if it was a 3 or an 8. His teacher sent him to the nurse, who smelled like teabags and feet, and she made him look at a chart on the wall.

His new eyeglasses were light as a feather and had special lenses that wouldn’t scratch even if he fell down and they went flying across a sandbox. The frames were made out of wire, too thin, in his opinion, to hold up the curved pieces of glass that made his eyes look like an owl’s: oversized, bright, so blue.

When Peter got his glasses he was amazed. Suddenly, the blur in the distance coagulated into a farm with silos and fields and spots of cows. The letters on the red sign said STOP. There were tiny lines, like the creases on his knuckles, at the corners of his mother’s eyes. All superheroes had accessories-Batman’s belt, Superman’s cape-this was his, and it gave him X-ray vision. He was so excited about having his new glasses that he slept with them.

It wasn’t until he got to school the next day that he understood that with better vision came perfect hearing: Four-eyes; blind as a bat. His glasses were no longer a mark of distinction but only a scar, something else that made him different from everyone else. And that wasn’t even the worst of it.

As the world came into focus, Peter realized how people looked when they glanced at him. As if he were the punch line to a joke.

And Peter, with his 20/20 vision, cast his eyes downward, so that he wouldn’t see.

“We are subversive parents,” Alex whispered to Lacy as they sat with their knees bent high as a grasshopper’s at one of the undersize tables during Open School Day. She took the Cuisenaire rods used for math-bright colored unit strips of twos, threes, fours, fives-and fashioned them to spell a curse word.

“It’s all fun and games until someone turns out to be a judge,” Lacy chided, and she scattered the word with her hand.

“Afraid I’m going to get you kicked out of kindergarten?” Alex laughed. “And as for the judge thing, that’s about as much of a long shot as me winning the lottery.”

“We’ll see,” Lacy said.

The teacher leaned down between them and handed each woman a small piece of paper. “Today I’m inviting all the parents to write down one word that best describes their child. Later, we’ll make a love collage out of them.”

Alex glanced at Lacy. “A love collage?”

“Stop being anti-kindergarten.”

“I’m not. In fact, I think everything you need to know about the law you learn in kindergarten. You know: Don’t hit. Don’t take what’s not yours. Don’t kill people. Don’t rape them.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember that lesson. Right after snack time,” Lacy said.

“You know what I mean. It’s a social contract.”

“What if you wound up on the bench and had to uphold a law you didn’t believe in?”

“First off, that’s a big if. And second, I’d do it. I’d feel horrible about it, but I’d do it,” Alex said. “You don’t want a judge with a personal agenda, believe me.”

Lacy tore the edge of her paper into a fringe. “If you become the job, then when do you get to be you?”

Alex grinned and pushed the Cuisenaire rods into another four-letter word. “At kindergarten open houses, I guess.”

Suddenly Josie appeared, rosy-cheeked and flushed. “Mommy,” she said, tugging on Alex’s hand as Peter climbed onto Lacy’s lap. “We’re all done.”

They had been in the block corner, creating a surprise. Lacy and Alex stood up, letting themselves be led past the book rack and the stacks of tiny carpets and the science table with its rotting pumpkin experiment whose pitted skin and sunken flesh reminded Alex of the face of a prosecutor she knew. “This is our house,” Josie announced, pushing open a block that served as the front door. “We’re married.”

Lacy nudged Alex. “I always wanted to get along with my in-laws.”

Peter stood at a wooden stove, mixing imaginary food in a plastic pot. Josie put on an oversize lab coat. “Time to go to work. I’ll be home for dinner.”

“Okay,” Peter said. “We’re having meatballs.”

“What’s your job?” Alex asked Josie.

“I’m a judge. I send people to jail all day long and then I come home and eat pisghetti.” She walked around the perimeter of the block house and reentered through the front door.

“Sit down,” Peter said. “You’re late again.”

Lacy closed her eyes. “Is it just me, or is this like looking into a really unflattering mirror?”

They watched Josie and Peter put aside their plates and then move to another part of their block house, a smaller square within the square. They lay down inside it. “This is the bed,” Josie explained.

The teacher came up behind Alex and Lacy. “They play house all the time,” she said. “Isn’t it sweet?”

Alex watched Peter curl up on his side. Josie spooned against him, wrapping her arm around his waist. She wondered how her daughter had ever formed an image of a couple like this in her mind, given that she’d never even seen her mother go out on a date.

She watched Lacy lean against the block cubby and write, on her small slip of paper, tender. That did describe Peter-he was tender, almost to the point of being raw. It took someone like Josie-curled around him like a shell-to protect him.

Alex reached for a pencil and smoothed out the piece of paper. Adjectives tumbled through her mind-there were so many for her daughter: dynamic, loyal, bright, breathtaking-but she found herself forming different letters.

Mine, she wrote.

This time when the lunch box hit the pavement, it broke wide across its hinges and the car behind the school bus ran right over his tuna fish sandwich and his bag of Doritos. The bus driver, as usual, didn’t notice. The fifth-grade boys were so good at doing this by now that the window was opened and closed before you could even yell for them to stop. Peter felt his eyes welling with tears as the boys high-fived each other. He could hear his mother’s voice in his head-this was the moment where he was supposed to stick up for himself!-but his mother did not realize that would only make it worse.

“Oh, Peter,” Josie sighed as he sat down again beside her.

He stared down at his mittens. “I don’t think I can go to your house on Friday.”

“How come?”

“Because my mom said she’ll punish me if I lose my lunch box again.”

“That’s not fair,” Josie said.

Peter shrugged. “Nothing is.”

No one was more surprised than Alex when the governor of New Hampshire officially picked her from a short list of three candidates for a district court judicial position. Although it made sense that Jeanne Shaheen-a young, Democratic female governor-would want to appoint a young, Democratic female judge, Alex was still a little light-headed over the news when she went for her interview.

The governor was younger than Alex had expected, and prettier. Which is exactly what most people will think about me if I’m on the bench, she thought. She sat down and slipped her hands under her thighs to keep them from shaking.

“If I nominate you,” the governor said, “is there anything I should know?”

“You mean skeletons in my closet?”

Shaheen nodded. What it really came down to, for a gubernatorial appointee, was whether or not that nominee would in some way reflect poorly on the governor herself. Shaheen was trying to cross her t’s and dot her i’s before making an official decision, and for that, Alex could only admire her. “Is anyone going to come to your Executive Council hearing and oppose your nomination?” the governor asked.

“That depends. Are you giving out furloughs at the state prison?”

Shaheen laughed. “I take it that’s where your disgruntled clients have ended up.”

“That’s exactly why they’re disgruntled.”

The governor stood up and shook Alex’s hand. “I think we’ll get along well,” she said.

Maine and New Hampshire were the only two states left in the country with an Executive Council-a group that acted as a direct check on the governor’s power. For Alex, this meant that in the month between her nomination and her confirmation hearing, she had to do whatever she could to placate five Republican men before they put her through the wringer.

She called them weekly, asking if they had any questions they needed answered. She also had to arrange for witnesses to appear on her behalf at the confirmation hearing. After years in the public defender’s office, this should have been simple, but the Executive Council did not want to hear from lawyers. They wanted to hear from the community where Alex worked and lived-from her first-grade teacher to a state trooper who liked her in spite of her allegiance to the Dark Side. The tricky part was that Alex had to call in all her favors to get these people to prepare and testify, but she also had to make it clear that if she did get confirmed as a judge, she could give them nothing in return.

And then, finally, it was Alex’s turn to take the hot seat. She sat in the Executive Council office in the State House, fielding questions that ranged from What was the last book you read? to Who has the burden of proof in abuse and neglect cases? Most of the questions were substantive and academic, until she was thrown a curve.

Ms. Cormier, who has the right to judge someone else?

“Well,” she said. “That depends on whether you’re judging in a moral sense or a legal sense. Morally, no one has the right to judge anyone else. But legally, it’s not a right-it’s a responsibility.”

Following up on that, what is your position on firearms?

Alex hesitated. She was not a fan of guns. She didn’t let Josie watch anything on television that showed violence. She knew what happened when you put a gun in the hand of a troubled kid, or an angry husband, or a battered wife-she’d defended those clients too many times to dismiss that kind of catalytic reaction.

And yet.

She was in New Hampshire, a conservative state, in front of a group of Republicans who were terrified she would turn out to be a left-wing loose cannon. She would be presiding over communities where hunting was not only revered but necessary.

Alex took a sip of water. “Legally,” she said, “I am pro-firearms.”

“It’s crazy,” Alex said as she stood in Lacy’s kitchen. “You go to these robe sites online, and the models are all linebackers with breasts. The public perception of a female judge is one that looks like Bea Arthur.” She leaned into the hallway and yelled up the stairs. “Josie! I’m counting to ten and then we’re leaving!”

“Are there choices?”

“Yeah, black…or black.” Alex folded her arms. “You can get cotton and polyester or just polyester. You can get bell sleeves or gathered sleeves. They’re all hideous. What I really want is something with a waist.”

“Guess Vera Wang doesn’t do judicial,” Lacy said.

“Not quite.” She stuck her head into the hallway again. “Josie! Now!”

Lacy put down the dish towel she had been using to dry a pan and followed Alex into the hall. “Peter! Josie’s mother has to get home!” When there was no response from the children, Lacy headed upstairs. “They’re probably hiding.”

Alex followed her into Peter’s bedroom, where Lacy threw open the closet doors and checked beneath the bed. From there, they checked the bathroom, Joey’s room, and the master bedroom. It wasn’t until they went downstairs again that they heard voices coming from the basement. “It’s heavy,” Josie said.

Then Peter: “Here. Like this.”

Alex wound down the wooden stairway. Lacy’s basement was a one-hundred-year-old root cellar with a dirt floor and cobwebs strung like Christmas decorations. She homed in on the whispers coming from a corner of the basement, and there, behind a stack of boxes and a shelf full of home-canned jelly, was Josie, holding a rifle.

“Oh my God,” Alex breathed, and Josie swung around, pointing the barrel at her.

Lacy grabbed the gun and pulled it away. “Where did you get this?” she demanded, and only then did Peter and Josie seem to realize that something was wrong.

“Peter,” Josie said. “He had a key.”

“A key?” Alex cried. “To what?”

“The safe,” Lacy murmured. “He must have seen Lewis taking out a rifle when he went hunting last weekend.”

“My daughter has been coming over to your house for how long now, and you’ve got guns lying around?”

“They’re not lying around,” Lacy said. “They’re in a locked gun safe.”

“Which your five-year-old can open!”

“Lewis keeps the bullets-”

“Where?” Alex demanded. “Or should I just ask Peter?”

Lacy turned to Peter. “You know better. What on earth made you do this?”

“I just wanted to show it to her, Mom. She asked.”

Josie lifted a frightened face. “I did not.”

Alex turned. “So now your son’s blaming Josie-”

“Or your daughter’s lying,” Lacy countered.

They stared at each other, two friends who had separated along the fault lines of their children. Alex’s face was flushed. What if, she kept thinking. What if they’d been five minutes later? What if Josie had been hurt, killed? On the edges of this thought, another one ignited-the answers she’d given the Executive Council weeks before. Who has the right to judge someone else?

No one, she had said.

And yet, here she was doing it.

I am pro-firearms, she had told them.

Did that make her a hypocrite? Or was she only being a good mother?

Alex watched Lacy kneel beside her son and that was all it took to trip the switch: Josie’s steadfast loyalty to Peter suddenly seemed to only be a weight dragging her down. Maybe it was best for Josie if she started making other friends. Friends who did not get her called to the principal’s office and who placed rifles in her hand.

Alex anchored Josie to her side. “I think we ought to leave.”

“Yes,” Lacy agreed, her voice cool. “I think that would be best.”

They were in the frozen-food aisle when Josie began her tantrum. “I don’t like peas,” she whined.

“You don’t have to eat them.” Alex opened up the freezer door, letting the cold air kiss her cheek as she reached for the Green Giant vegetables.

“I want Oreos.”

“You’re not getting Oreos. You already had animal crackers.” Josie had been contentious for a week now, ever since the fiasco at Lacy’s house. Alex knew she couldn’t keep Josie from being with Peter at school during the day, but that didn’t mean she had to cultivate the relationship by allowing Josie to invite him over to play afterward.

Alex hauled a vat of Poland Spring water into her cart, then a bottle of wine. On second thought, she reached for another. “Do you want chicken or hamburger for dinner?”

“I want tofurkey.”

Alex started laughing. “Where did you hear about tofurkey?”

“Lacy made it for us for lunch. They’re like hot dogs but they’re better for you.”

Alex stepped forward as her number was called at the meat counter. “Can I have a half pound of boneless chicken breasts?”

“How come you get what you want, but I never get what I want?” Josie accused.

“Believe me, you’re not as deprived a child as you’d like to think you are.”

“I want an apple,” Josie announced.

Alex sighed. “Can we just please get through the grocery store without you saying I want again?”

Before Alex realized what her daughter was doing, Josie kicked out from the seat of the shopping cart, catching Alex hard in the middle. “I hate you!” Josie screamed. “You’re the worst mom in the whole world!”

Alex was uncomfortably aware of the other shoppers looking at her-the old woman feeling melons, the grocery employee with his fists full of fresh broccoli. Why did kids always fall apart in venues where you would be duly measured for your actions? “Josie,” she said, smiling through her teeth, “calm down.”

“I wish you were like Peter’s mother! I wish I could just go live with them.”

Alex grasped her shoulders, hard enough to make Josie burst into tears. “You listen to me,” she said in a heated undertone, and then she caught a distant whisper, and the word judge.

There had been an article in the local paper about her recent appointment to the district court; it ran with a photo. Alex had felt the spark of recognition when she passed people in the baking aisle and the cereal aisle: Oh, that’s her. But right now, she also felt the checks and balances of their stares as they watched her with Josie, waiting for her to act-well-judiciously.

She relaxed her grasp. “I know you’re tired,” Alex said, loud enough for the rest of the entire store to hear. “I know you want to go home. But you have to behave when we’re out in public.”

Josie blinked through her tears, listening to the Voice of Reason and wondering what this alien creature had done with her real mother, who would have yelled right back at her and told her to cut it out.

A judge, Alex suddenly realized, doesn’t get to be a judge only on the bench. She’s still a judge when she goes out to a restaurant or dances at a party or wants to throttle her child in the middle of the produce aisle. Alex had been given a mantle to wear, without realizing that there was a catch: she would never be allowed to take it off.

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask…with nothing beneath it?

Alex pushed the cart toward the checkout lines. By now, her raging child had turned into a contrite little girl again. She listened to Josie’s diminishing hiccups. “There,” she said, to comfort herself as much as her daughter. “Isn’t that better?”

Alex’s first day on the bench was spent in Keene. No one but her clerk would know officially that it was her first day-attorneys had heard she was new, but weren’t sure when she quite started-and yet, she was terrified. She changed her outfit three times, even though no one would see it underneath her robe. She threw up twice before she left for the courthouse.

She knew how to get to chambers-after all, she’d tried cases here on the other side of the bench a hundred times. The clerk was a thin man named Ishmael who remembered Alex from their previous meetings and hadn’t particularly liked her-she’d cracked up after he introduced himself (“Call me Ishmael”). Today, however, he practically fell at her high-heeled feet. “Welcome, Your Honor,” he said. “Here’s your docket. I’ll take you to your chambers, and we’ll send a court officer in to get you when we’re ready. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“No,” Alex said. “I’m all set.”

He left her in chambers, which were freezing cold. She adjusted the thermostat and pulled her robe out of her briefcase to dress. There was an adjoining bathroom; Alex stepped inside to scrutinize herself. She looked fair. Commanding.

And maybe a little like a choirgirl.

She sat down at the desk and immediately thought of her father. Look at me, Daddy, she thought, although by now he was in a place where he couldn’t hear her. She could remember dozens of cases he’d tried; he’d come home and tell her about them over dinner. What she couldn’t remember were the moments when he wasn’t a judge and was just her father.

Alex scanned the files she needed for that morning’s run of arraignments. Then she looked at her watch. She still had forty-five minutes before court went into session; it was her own damn fault for being so nervous that she’d gotten here too early. She stood up, stretched. She could do cartwheels in this room, it was that big.

But she wouldn’t, because judges didn’t do that.

Tentatively, she opened the door to the hall, and immediately Ishmael materialized. “Your Honor? What can I do for you?”

“Coffee,” Alex said. “That would be nice.”

Ishmael jumped on this request so fast that Alex realized if she asked him to go out and buy a gift for Josie’s birthday, he would have it wrapped and on her desk by noon. She followed him into the lounge, one shared by attorneys and other judges, and walked toward the coffeemaker. Immediately, a young attorney fell back. “You go right ahead, Your Honor,” she said, giving up her place in line.

Alex reached for a paper cup. She’d have to remember to bring a mug to leave in chambers. Then again, since her position was a rotating one that would take her through Laconia, Concord, Keene, Nashua, Rochester, Milford, Jaffrey, Peterborough, Grafton, and Coos, depending on what day of the week it was, she’d have to find a lot of coffee mugs. She pushed down on the thermal coffee dispenser, only to have it whistle and hiss-empty. Without even thinking about it, she reached for a filter to make a fresh pot.

“Your Honor, you don’t have to do that,” the attorney said, clearly embarrassed on Alex’s behalf. She took the filter out of her hand and started to make the coffee.

Alex stared at the lawyer. She wondered if anyone would ever call her Alex again, or if she should just have her name officially changed to Your Honor. She wondered if anyone would have the guts to tell her if she had toilet paper hanging off her shoe as she walked down the hall, or if she had spinach in her teeth. It was a strange feeling to be scrutinized so carefully and to know all the same that no one would ever dare to tell her to her face that something was wrong.

The lawyer brought her the maiden cup of fresh coffee. “I wasn’t sure how you liked it, Your Honor,” she said, offering sugar and creamer cups.

“This is fine,” Alex said, but as she reached for the cup, her bell sleeve caught the edge of the Styrofoam, and the coffee spilled.

Smooth, Alex, she thought.

“Oh, gosh,” the lawyer said. “I’m sorry!”

Why are you sorry, Alex wondered, when it was my fault? The girl was already setting out napkins to clean up the mess, so Alex stripped off her gown to clean it. For one giddy moment she thought about not stopping there-disrobing completely, down to her bra and panties, and parading through the courthouse like the Emperor in the fairy tale. Isn’t my gown beautiful? she’d say, and she would listen to everyone answer: Oh, yes, Your Honor.

She rinsed the sleeve off in the sink and wrung it dry. Then, still carrying her robe, she started back to chambers. But the thought of sitting there for another half hour, alone, was too depressing, so instead Alex began to wander the halls of the Keene courthouse. She took turns she’d never taken before and wound up at a basement door that led to a loading zone.

Outside, she found a woman dressed in the green jumpsuit of a groundskeeper, smoking a cigarette. The air was full of winter, and frost glittered on the asphalt like broken glass. Alex wrapped her arms around herself-it was quite possibly even colder out here than in chambers-and nodded at the stranger. “Hi,” she said.

“Hey.” The woman exhaled a stream of smoke. “I haven’t seen you around here before. What’s your name?”

“Alex.”

“I’m Liz. I’m the whole property maintenance department.” She grinned. “So where do you work in the courthouse?”

Alex fumbled in her pocket for a box of Tic Tacs-not that she wanted or needed a mint, but because she wanted to buy some time before this conversation came to a screeching halt. “Um,” she said, “I’m the judge.”

Immediately, Liz’s face fell, and she stepped back, uncomfortable.

“You know, I hate telling you that, because it was so nice the way you just struck up a conversation with me. No one else around here will do that and it’s…well, it’s a little lonely.” Alex hesitated. “Could you maybe forget that I’m the judge?”

Liz ground out the cigarette beneath her boot. “Depends.”

Alex nodded. She turned the small plastic box of mints over in her palm; they rattled like music. “You want a Tic Tac?”

After a moment, Liz held out her hand. “Sure, Alex,” she said, and she smiled.

Peter had taken to wandering his own home like a ghost. He was grounded, which had something to do with the fact that Josie didn’t come over anymore, even though they used to see each other after school three or four times a week. Joey didn’t want to play with him-he was always off at soccer practice or playing a computer game where you had to drive really fast around a racetrack that was bent like a paper clip-which meant that Peter, officially, had nothing to do.

One evening after dinner, he heard rustling in the basement. He hadn’t been down there since his mother had found him with Josie and the gun, but now he was drawn like a moth to the light over his father’s workbench. His father sat on a stool in front of it, holding the very gun that had gotten Peter into so much trouble.

“Aren’t you supposed to be getting ready for bed?” his father asked.

“I’m not tired.” He watched his father’s hands run down the swan neck of the rifle.

“Pretty, isn’t it? It’s a Remington 721. A thirty-ought-six.” Peter’s father turned to him. “Want to help me clean it?”

Peter instinctively glanced toward the stairs, where his mother was washing dishes from dinner.

“The way I figure it, Peter, if you’re so interested in guns, you need to learn how to respect them. Better safe than sorry, right? Even your mom can’t argue with that.” He cradled the gun in his lap. “A gun is a very, very dangerous thing, but what makes it so dangerous is that most people don’t really understand how it works. And once you do, it’s just a tool, like a hammer or a screwdriver, and it doesn’t do anything unless you know how to pick it up and use it correctly. You understand?”

Peter didn’t, but he wasn’t about to tell his father. He was about to learn how to use a real rifle! None of those idiot kids in his class, the ones who were such jerks, could say that.

“First thing we have to do is open the bolt, like this, to make sure there aren’t any bullets in it. Look in the magazine, right down there. See any?” Peter shook his head. “Now check again. You can never check too many times. Now, there’s a little button under the receiver-just in front of the trigger guard-push that and you can remove the bolt completely.”

Peter watched his father take off the big silver ratchet that attached the butt of the rifle to the barrel, just like that. He reached onto his workbench for a bottle of solvent-Hoppes #9, Peter read-and spilled a little bit on a rag. “There’s nothing like hunting, Peter,” his father said. “To be out in the woods when the rest of the world is still sleeping…to see that deer raise its head and stare right at you…” He held the rag away from him-the smell made Peter’s head swim-and started to rub the bolt with it. “Here,” Peter’s father said. “Why don’t you do this?”

Peter’s jaw dropped-he was being told to hold the rifle, after what had happened with Josie? Maybe it was because his father was here to supervise, or maybe this was a trick and he was going to get punished for wanting to hold it again. Tentative, he reached for it-surprised, as he had been before, at how incredibly heavy it was. On Joey’s computer game, Big Buck Hunter, the characters swung their rifles around as if they were feather-light.

It wasn’t a trick. His father wanted him to help, for real. Peter watched him reach for another tin-gun oil-and dribble some onto a clean rag. “We wipe down the bolt and put a drop on the firing pin…. You want to know how a gun works, Peter? Come over here.” He pointed out the firing pin, a teensy circle inside the circle of the bolt. “Inside the bolt, where you can’t see it, there’s a big spring. When you pull the trigger, it releases the spring, which hits this firing pin and pushes it out just the tiniest bit-” He held his thumb and forefinger apart just a fraction of an inch, for illustration. “That firing pin hits the center of a brass bullet…and dents a little silver button called the primer. The dent sets off the charge, which is gunpowder inside the brass casing. You’ve seen a bullet-how it gets thinner and thinner at the end? That skinny part holds the actual bullet, and when the gunpowder goes off, it creates pressure behind the bullet and pushes it from behind.”

Peter’s father took the bolt out of his hands, wiped it with oil, and set it aside. “Now look into the barrel.” He pointed the gun as if he were going to shoot at a lightbulb on the ceiling. “What do you see?”

Peter peeked into the open barrel from behind. “It’s like the noodles Mom makes for lunch.”

“Yeah, I guess it is. Rotini? Is that what they’re called? The twists in the barrel are like a screw. As the bullet gets pushed out, these grooves make the bullet turn. Kind of like when you throw a football and put some spin on it.”

Peter had tried to do that in the backyard with his father and Joey, but his hand was too small or the football was too big and when he tried to make a pass, mostly it just crashed at his own feet.

“If the bullet comes out spinning, it can fly straight without wobbling.” His father began to fiddle with a long rod that had a loop of wire on the end. Sticking a patch into the loop, he dipped it in solvent. “The gunpowder leaves gunk inside the barrel, though,” he said. “And that’s what we have to clean off.”

Peter watched his father jam the rod into the barrel, up and down, like he was churning butter. He put on a clean patch and ran it through the barrel again, and then another, until they didn’t come out streaked black anymore. “When I was your age, my father showed me how to do this, too.” He threw the patch out in the trash. “One day, you and I will go hunting.”

Peter couldn’t contain himself at the very thought of this. He-who couldn’t throw a football or dribble a soccer ball or even swim very well-was going to go hunting with his father? He loved the thought of leaving Joey at home. He wondered how long he’d have to wait for this outing-how it would feel to be doing something with his father that was just theirs.

“Ah,” his father said. “Now, look down the barrel again.”

Peter grabbed the gun backward, looking down through the muzzle, the barrel of the gun pressed up against his face near his eye. “Jesus, Peter!” his father said, taking it out of his hands. “Not like that! You’ve got it backward!” He turned the gun so that the barrel was facing away from Peter. “Even though the bolt’s way over there-and it’s safe-you don’t ever look down the muzzle of a rifle. You don’t point a gun at something you don’t want to kill.”

Peter squinted, looking into the barrel the right way. It was blinding, silver, shiny. Perfect.

His father rubbed down the outside of the barrel with oil. “Now, pull the trigger.”

Peter stared at him. Even he knew you didn’t do that.

“It’s safe,” his father repeated. “It’s what we need to do to reassemble the gun.”

Peter hesitantly curled his finger around the half-moon of metal and pulled. It released a catch so that the bolt his father was holding slid into place.

He watched his father take the rifle back to the gun cabinet. “People who get upset about guns don’t know them,” his father said. “If you know them, you can handle them safely.”

Peter watched his father lock up the gun case. He understood what his father was trying to say: The mystery of the rifle-the very thing that had sparked him to steal the key to the cabinet from his father’s underwear drawer and show Josie-was no longer quite as compelling. Now that he’d seen it taken apart and put back together, he saw the firearm for what it was: a collection of fitted metal, the sum of its parts.

A gun was nothing, really, without a person behind it.

Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who you blame when something goes wrong. Do you think it’s your fault-that if you’d tried better, or worked harder, it wouldn’t have happened? Or do you just chalk it up to circumstance?

I know people who’ll hear about the people who died, and will say it was God’s will. I know people who’ll say it was bad luck. And then there’s my personal favorite: They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Then again, you could say the same thing about me, couldn’t you?

The Day After

For Peter’s sixth Christmas, he’d been given a fish. It was one of those Japanese fighting fish, a beta with a shredded tissue-thin tail that trailed like the gown of a movie star. Peter named it Wolverine and spent hours staring at its moonbeam scales, its sequin eye. But after a few days, he started to imagine what it would be like to have only a bowl to explore. He wondered if the fish hovered over the tendril of plastic plant each time it passed because there was something new and amazing he’d discovered about its shape and size, or because it was a way to count another lap.

Peter started waking up in the middle of the night to see if his fish ever slept, but no matter what time it was, Wolverine was swimming. He thought about what the fish saw: a magnified eyeball, rising like a sun through the thick glass bowl. He’d listen to Pastor Ron at church, talking about God seeing everything, and he wondered if that was what he was to Wolverine.

As he sat in a cell at the Grafton County jail, Peter tried to remember what had happened to his fish. It died, he supposed. He’d probably watched it to death.

He stared up at the camera in the corner of the cell, which blinked at him impassively. They-whoever they were-wanted to make sure he didn’t kill himself before he was publicly crucified. To this end, his cell didn’t have a cot or a pillow or even a mat-just a hard bench, and that stupid camera.

Then again, maybe this was a good thing. As far as he could tell, he was alone in this little pod of single cells. He’d been terrified when the sheriff’s car pulled up in front of the jail. He’d watched all the TV shows; he knew what happened in places like this. The whole time he was being processed, Peter had kept his mouth shut-not because he was so tough, but because he was afraid that if he opened it he would start to cry, and not remember how to stop. There was the swordfight sound of metal being drawn across metal, and then footsteps. Peter stayed where he was, his hands locked between his knees, his shoulders hunched. He didn’t want to look too eager; he didn’t want to look pathetic. Invisibility, actually, was something he was pretty good at. He’d perfected it over the past twelve years.

A correctional officer stopped in front of his cell. “You’ve got a visitor,” he said, and he opened the door.

Peter got up slowly. He looked up at the camera, and then followed the officer down a pitted gray hallway.

How hard would it be to get out of this jail? What if, like in all the video games, he could do some fancy kung fu move and deck this guard, and another, and another, until he was able to race out the door and suck in the air whose taste he’d already started to forget?

What if he had to stay here forever?

That was when he remembered what had happened to his fish. In a sweeping moment of animal rights and humanity, Peter had taken Wolverine and flushed him down the toilet. He figured that the plumbing emptied out into some big ocean, like the one his family had gone to last summer on a beach vacation, and that maybe Wolverine could find his way back to Japan and his other beta relatives. It was after Peter confided in his brother that Joey told him about sewers, and that instead of giving his pet freedom, Peter had killed it.

The officer stopped in front of a room whose door read PRIVATE CONFERENCE. He couldn’t imagine who would visit him, except for his parents, and he didn’t want to see them yet. They would ask him questions he couldn’t answer-about how you could tuck a son into bed, and not recognize him the next morning. Maybe it would be easier to just go back to the camera in his cell, which stared but didn’t pass judgment.

“Here you go,” the officer said, and he opened the door.

Peter took a shuddering breath. He wondered what his fish had thought, expecting the cool blue of the sea, only to wind up swimming in shit.

Jordan walked into the Grafton County Jail and stopped at the check-in point. He had to sign in before he went to visit Peter Houghton and get a visitor’s badge from the correctional officer on the other side of the Plexiglas divider. Jordan reached for the clipboard and scrawled his name, then pushed it through the tiny slot at the bottom of the plastic wall-but there was no one there to receive it. The two COs inside were huddled around a small black-and-white TV that was tuned, like every other television on the planet, to a news report about the shooting.

“Excuse me,” Jordan said, but neither man turned.

“When the shooting began,” the reporter was saying, “Ed McCabe peered out the door of his ninth-grade math classroom, putting himself between the gunman and his students.”

The screen cut to a sobbing woman, identified in white block letters below her face as JOAN MCCABE, SISTER OF VICTIM. “He cared about his kids,” she wept. “He cared about them the whole seven years he’d taught at Sterling, and he cared about them during the last minute of his life.”

Jordan shifted his weight. “Hello?”

“Just a second, buddy,” one correctional officer said, waving an absent hand in his direction.

The reporter appeared again on the grainy screen, his hair blowing upward like a boat’s sail in the light wind, the monotone brick of the school a wall behind him. “Fellow teachers remember Ed McCabe as a committed teacher who was always willing to go the extra mile to help a student, and as an avid outdoorsman who talked often in the faculty room about his dreams to hike through Alaska. A dream,” the reporter said gravely, “that will never come to pass.”

Jordan took the clipboard and shoved it through the slot in the Plexiglas, so that it clattered on the floor. Both correctional officers turned at once.

“I’m here to see my client,” he said.

Lewis Houghton had never missed a lecture in the nineteen years he’d been a professor at Sterling College, until today. When Lacy had called he’d left in such a hurry that he hadn’t even thought to put a sign on the lecture hall’s door. He imagined students waiting for him to appear, waiting to take notes on the very words that came out of his mouth, as if the things he had to say were still beyond reproach.

What word, what platitude, what comment of his had led Peter to this?

What word, what platitude, what comment might have stopped him?

He and Lacy were sitting in their backyard, waiting for the police to leave the house. Well, they had left-or at least one of them-to broaden the search warrant, most likely. Lewis and Lacy had not been allowed into their own home for the duration of the search. For a while, they’d stood in the driveway, occasionally watching officers carry out bags and boxes full of things Lewis would have expected-computers, books from Peter’s room-and things he hadn’t-a tennis racket, a jumbo box of waterproof matches.

“What do we do?” Lacy murmured.

He shook his head, numb. For one of his journal articles on the value of happiness, he’d interviewed elderly folks who were suicidal. What’s left for us? they’d said, and at the time, Lewis had not been able to understand that utter lack of hope. At the time, he couldn’t imagine the world going so sour that you couldn’t see the way to set it to rights.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Lewis replied, and he meant it. He watched an officer walk out holding a stack of Peter’s old comic books.

When he’d first come home to find Lacy pacing the driveway, she’d flung herself into his arms. “Why,” she had sobbed. “Why?”

There were a thousand questions in that one, but Lewis couldn’t answer any of them. He’d held on to his wife as if she were driftwood in the middle of this flood, and then he had noticed the eyes of a neighbor across the street, peeking from a drawn curtain.

That’s when they had moved to the backyard. They sat on the porch swing, surrounded by a thicket of bare branches and melting snow. Lewis sat perfectly still, his fingers and lips numb from cold, from shock.

“Do you think,” Lacy whispered, “it’s our fault?”

He stared at her, amazed at her bravery: she’d put into words what he hadn’t allowed himself to even think. But what else was left to say between them? The shootings had happened; their son was involved. You couldn’t argue the facts; you could only change the lens through which you looked at them.

Lewis bent his head. “I don’t know.” Where did you even begin to look at those statistics? Had it happened because Lacy had picked Peter up too much as a baby? Or because Lewis had pretended to laugh when Peter took a tumble, hoping that the toddler wouldn’t cry if he didn’t think there was anything to cry about? Should they have monitored more closely what he read, watched, listened to…or would smothering him have led to the same outcome? Or maybe it was the combination of Lacy and Lewis together. If a couple’s children counted as a track record, then they had failed miserably.

Twice.

Lacy stared down at the intricate brickwork between her shoes. Lewis remembered laying this patio; he’d leveled the sand and set the brick himself. Peter had wanted to help, but Lewis hadn’t let him. The bricks were too heavy. You could get hurt, he’d said.

If Lewis had been less protective-if Peter had felt true pain, might he have been less likely to inflict it?

“What was the name of Hitler’s mother?” Lacy asked.

Lewis blinked at her. “What?”

“Was she awful?”

He put his arm around Lacy. “Don’t do this to yourself,” he murmured.

She buried her face in his shoulder. “Everyone else will.”

For just a moment, Lewis let himself believe that everyone was mistaken-that Peter couldn’t have been the shooter today. In a way, this was true-although there had been hundreds of witnesses, the boy they’d seen was not the same one Lewis had talked to last night before he went to bed. They’d had a conversation about Peter’s car.

You know you have to get it inspected by the end of the month, Lewis had said.

Yeah, Peter had replied. I already made an appointment.

Had he been lying about that, too?

“The lawyer-”

“He said he’ll call us,” Lewis answered.

“Did you tell him Peter’s allergic to shellfish? If they feed him any-”

“I told him,” Lewis said, although he hadn’t. He pictured Peter, sitting alone in a cell at a jail he’d driven by every summer, en route to the Haverhill Fairgrounds. He thought of Peter, calling home on the second night of sleepaway camp, begging to be picked up. He thought of his son, who was still his son, even if he had done something so horrible that Lewis could not close his eyes without imagining the worst; and then his ribs felt too tight and he couldn’t draw in enough air.

“Lewis?” Lacy said, pulling away as he gasped. “Are you all right?”

He nodded, smiled, but he was choking on the truth.

“Mr. Houghton?”

They both glanced up to find a police officer standing in front of them.

“Sir, could you come with me for a second?”

Lacy stood up beside him, but he held her off with one hand. He didn’t know where this cop was taking him, what he was about to be shown. He didn’t want Lacy to see it if she didn’t have to.

He followed the policeman into his own house, arrested for a moment by the white-gloved officers combing through his kitchen, his closet. As soon as they reached the basement door, he started to sweat. He knew where they were headed; it was something he had studiously avoided thinking about since he’d first gotten Lacy’s call.

Another officer was standing in the basement, blocking Lewis’s view. It was ten degrees colder down here, and yet Lewis was sweating. He mopped his forehead with his sleeve. “These rifles,” the officer said. “They belong to you?”

Lewis swallowed. “Yes. I hunt.”

“Can you tell us, Mr. Houghton, if all your firearms are here?” The officer stepped aside to reveal the glass-fronted gun cabinet.

Lewis felt his knees buckle. Three of his five hunting rifles were nestled inside the gun cabinet, like wallflowers at a dance. Two were missing.

Until this moment, he had not allowed himself to believe this horrible thing about Peter. Until this moment, it had been a devastating accident.

Now, Lewis started blaming himself.

He faced the officer, looking the man in the eye without giving any of his feelings away. An expression, Lewis realized, he’d learned from his own son. “No,” he said. “They’re not.”

The first unwritten rule of defense law was to act like you knew everything, when in fact you knew absolutely nothing at all. You were facing an unknown client who may or may not have had a chance in hell of acquittal; the trick, however, was to remain simultaneously impassive and impressive. You had to immediately set the parameters of the relationship: I am boss; you tell me only what I need to hear.

Jordan had been in this situation a hundred times before-waiting, in a private conference room at this very jail, for his next meal ticket to arrive-and he truly believed he had seen it all, which is why he was stunned to find that Peter Houghton had the ability to surprise him. Given the magnitude of the shooting and the damage wrought, the terror on the faces Jordan had seen on the television screen-well, this skinny, freckled, four-eyed kid hardly seemed capable of such an act.

This was his first thought. His second was: That’ll work to my advantage.

“Peter,” he said. “I’m Jordan McAfee, and I’m a lawyer. I’ve been retained by your parents to represent you.”

He waited for a response. “Have a seat,” he said, but the boy remained standing. “Or don’t,” Jordan added. He put on his business mask and looked up at Peter. “You’ll be arraigned tomorrow. You’re not going to get bail. We’ll have a chance to go over the charges in the morning, before you go into court.” He gave Peter a moment to digest this information. “From here on in, you’re not going through this alone. You’ve got me.”

Was it Jordan’s imagination, or had something flashed in Peter’s eyes when he’d said those words? As quickly as it might have happened, it was gone; Peter stared down at the ground, expressionless.

“Well,” Jordan said, getting to his feet. “Any questions?”

As he expected, there wasn’t any response. Hell, for all of Peter’s involvement in this little discussion, Jordan might as well have been chatting up one of the less fortunate victims of the shooting.