know. That’s why I took a chance that you’d see me-I want you to evaluate my client.”

“Jordan, man, you know I would, but I’m booking nearly six months out for trial work.”

“This one’s different, King. It’s multiple murder charges.”

“Murders?” King said. “How many husbands did she kill?”

“None, and it’s not a she. It’s a boy. A kid. He was bullied for years, and then turned around and shot up Sterling High School.”

King handed half of his tuna sandwich to Jordan. “All right, little brother,” he said. “Let’s talk over lunch.”

Josie glanced from the serviceable gray tile floor to the cinder-block walls, from the iron bars that isolated Dispatch from the sitting area to the heavy door with its automatic lock. It was kind of like a jail, and she wondered if the policemen inside ever thought about that irony. But then, as soon as the image of jail popped into her head, Josie thought of Peter and began to panic again. “I don’t want to be here,” she said, turning to her mother.

“I know.”

“Why does he even want to talk to me again? I already told him I can’t remember anything.”

They had received the letter in the mail; Detective Ducharme had “a few more questions” to ask her. To Josie, that meant he must know something now that he hadn’t known the first time he questioned her. Her mother had explained that a second interview was just a way of making sure the prosecution had dotted their i’s and crossed their t’s; that it really didn’t mean anything at all, but that she had to go to the station, all the same. God forbid Josie be the one to screw up the investigation.

“All you have to do is tell him, again, that you don’t remember anything…and you’ll be all done,” her mother said, and she gently put her hand on Josie’s knee, which had begun shaking.

What Josie wanted to do was stand up, burst through the double doors of the police station, and start running. She wanted to sprint through the parking lot and across the street, over the middle school playing fields and into the woods that edged the town pond, up the mountains that she could sometimes see from her bedroom window if the leaves had fallen from the trees, until she was as high as she could possibly go. And then…

And then maybe she’d just spread her arms and step off the edge of the world.

What if this was all a setup?

What if Detective Ducharme already knew…everything?

“Josie,” a voice said. “Thanks so much for coming down here.”

She glanced up to see the detective standing in front of them. Her mother got to her feet. Josie tried, honestly she did, but she couldn’t find the courage to do it.

“Judge, I appreciate you bringing your daughter down here.”

“Josie’s very upset,” her mother said. “She still can’t remember anything about that day.”

“I need to hear that from Josie herself.” The detective knelt so that he could look into her eyes. He had, Josie realized, nice eyes. A little sad, like a basset hound’s. It made her wonder what it would be like to hear all these stories from the wounded and the stunned; if you couldn’t help but absorb them by osmosis. “I promise,” he said gently. “This won’t take long.”

Josie started to imagine what it would feel like when the door to the conference room closed; how questions could build up like the pressure inside a champagne bottle. She wondered what hurt more: not remembering what had happened, no matter how hard you tried to will it to the front of your mind, or recalling every last, awful moment.

Out of the corner of her eye, Josie saw her mother sit back down. “Aren’t you coming in with me?”

The last time the detective had talked to her, her mother had pulled the same excuse-she was the judge, she couldn’t possibly sit in on the police interview. But then they’d had that conversation after the arraignment; her mother had gone out of her way to let Josie know that acting like a judge on this case would not be mutually exclusive to acting like a mother. Or in other words: Josie had been stupid enough to think that things between them might have started to change.

Her mother’s mouth opened and closed, like a fish out of water. Did I make you uncomfortable? Josie thought, the words rising like welts in her mind. Welcome to the club.

“You want a cup of coffee?” the detective said, and then he shook his head. “Or a Coke. I don’t know, do kids your age drink coffee yet, or am I dangling a vice right in front of you because I’m too stupid to know better?”

“I like coffee,” Josie said. She avoided her mother’s gaze as Detective Ducharme led her into the inner sanctum of the police station.

They went into a conference room and the detective poured her a mug of coffee. “Milk? Sugar?”

“Sugar,” Josie said. She took two packets from the bowl and added them to the mug. Then she glanced around-at the Formica table, the fluorescent lights, the normalness of the room.

“What?”

“What what?” Josie said.

“What’s the matter?”

“I was just thinking that this doesn’t look like the kind of place where you’d beat a confession out of someone.”

“Depends on whether you’ve got one to be beaten out of you,” the detective said. When Josie blanched, he laughed. “I’m just joking. Honestly, the only time I beat confessions out of people is when I’m playing a cop on TV.”

“You play a cop on TV?”

He sighed. “Never mind.” He reached over to a tape recorder in the center of the table. “I’m going to record this, just like before…mostly because I’m too dumb to remember it all correctly.” The detective pressed the button and sat down across from Josie. “Do people tell you all the time that you look like your mom?”

“Um, never.” She tilted her head. “Is that what you brought me down to ask me?”

He smiled. “No.”

“I don’t look like her, anyway.”

“Sure you do. It’s your eyes.”

Josie looked down at the table. “Mine are a totally different color than hers.”

“I wasn’t talking about the color,” the detective said. “Josie, tell me again what you saw the day of the shootings at Sterling High.”

Underneath the table, Josie gripped her hands together. She dug the nails of one hand into the palm of the other, so that something hurt more than the words he was making her say. “I had a science test. I’d studied really late for it, and I was thinking about it when I woke up in the morning. That’s all I know. I already told you, I can’t even remember being in school that day.”

“Do you remember what made you pass out in the locker room?”

Josie closed her eyes. She could picture the locker room-the tile floor, the gray lockers, the orphan sock stuffed in a corner of the shower. And then, everything went red as anger. Red as blood.

“No,” Josie said, but tears had cut her voice into lace. “I don’t even know why thinking about it makes me cry.” She hated being seen like this; she hated being like this; most of all she hated not knowing when it would happen: a shift of the wind, a turn of the tide. Josie took the tissue the detective offered. “Please,” she whispered, “can I just go now?”

There was a moment of hesitation, and Josie could feel the weight of the detective’s pity falling over her like a net, one that only held on to her words, while the rest-the shame, the anger, the fear-seeped right through. “Sure, Josie,” he said. “You can go.”

Alex was pretending to read the Town of Sterling Annual Report when Josie suddenly burst out of the secured door into the police station’s waiting area. She was crying hard, and Patrick Ducharme was nowhere in sight. I’ll kill him, Alex thought rationally, calmly, after I take care of my daughter.

“Josie,” she said, as Josie ran past her out of the building, toward the parking lot. Alex hurried after her, finally catching up to Josie in front of their car. She wrapped her arms around Josie’s waist and felt her buckle. “Leave me alone,” Josie sobbed.

“Josie, honey, what did he say to you? Talk to me.”

“I can’t talk to you! You don’t understand. None of you understand.” Josie backed away. “The people who do, they’re all dead.”

Alex hesitated, unsure of the right move. She could fold Josie tighter into an embrace and let her cry. Or she could make her see that no matter how upset she was, it was something she had the resources to handle. Sort of like an Allen charge, Alex realized-the instruction a judge would give to a jury that wasn’t getting anywhere in its deliberations, which basically reminded them of their duty as American citizens, and assured them that they could and would come to a consensus.

It had always worked for her in court.

“I know this is hard, Josie, but you’re stronger than you think, and-”

Josie shoved her hard, breaking away. “Stop talking to me like that!”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m some fucking witness or lawyer you’re trying to impress!”

“Your Honor. Sorry to interrupt.”

Alex wheeled around to find Patrick Ducharme standing two feet behind them, listening to every single word. Her cheeks reddened; this was exactly the kind of behavior you didn’t put on public display when you were a judge. He’d probably go back into the police station and send out a mass email to the entire force: Guess what I just overheard.

“Your daughter,” he said. “She forgot her sweatshirt.”

Pink and hooded, it was folded neatly over his arm. He handed it to Josie. But then, instead of backing away, he put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry, Josie,” he said, meeting her gaze as if they were the only two people in this world. “We’re going to make this okay.”

Alex expected Josie to snap at him, too, but instead Josie went calm under his touch. She nodded, as if she believed this for the first time since the shooting had occurred.

Alex felt something rise inside her-relief, she realized, that her daughter had finally reached out for the slightest bit of hope. And regret, bitter as any almond, because she had not been the one to put the peace back into her daughter’s face.

Josie wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “You all right?” Ducharme asked.

“I guess.”

“Good.” The detective nodded in Alex’s direction. “Judge.”

“Thank you,” she murmured, as he turned and started back to the police station.

Alex heard the slam of the car door as Josie slipped into the passenger seat, but she watched Patrick Ducharme until he disappeared from sight. I wish it had been me, Alex thought, and she deliberately kept herself from filling in the rest of that sentence.

Like Peter, Derek Markowitz was a computer whiz. Like Peter, he hadn’t been blessed with muscles and height or, for that matter, any gifts of puberty. He had hair that stuck up in small tufts, as if it had been planted. He wore his shirt tucked into his pants at all times, and he had never been popular.

Unlike Peter, he hadn’t gone to school one day and killed ten people.

Selena sat at the Markowitzes’ kitchen table, while Dee Dee Markowitz watched her like a hawk. She was there to interview Derek in the hope that he could be a witness for the defense-but to be perfectly honest, the information Derek had given her so far made him a much better candidate for the prosecution.

“What if it’s all my fault?” Derek was saying. “I mean, I’m the only one who was given a clue. If I’d been listening harder, maybe I could have stopped him. I could have told someone else. But instead, I figured he was joking around.”

“I don’t think anyone would have done any differently in your situation,” Selena said gently, and she meant it. “The Peter you knew wasn’t the one who went to the school that day.”

“Yeah,” Derek said, and he nodded to himself.

“Are you about finished?” Dee Dee asked, stepping forward. “Derek’s got a violin lesson.”

“Almost, Mrs. Markowitz. I just wanted to ask Derek about the Peter he did know. How’d you two meet?”

“We were both on a soccer team together in sixth grade,” Derek said, “and we both sucked.”

“Derek!”

“Sorry, Mom, but it’s true.” He glanced up at Selena. “Then again, none of those jocks could write HTML code if their lives depended on it.”

Selena smiled. “Yeah, well, count me in the ranks of the technologically impaired. So you two got to be friends while you were on the team?”

“We hung out on the bench, because we were never put in to play,” Derek said. “But no, we weren’t really friends until after that, when he stopped hanging out with Josie.”

Selena fumbled her pen. “Josie?”

“Yeah, Josie Cormier. She goes to the school, too.”

“And she’s Peter’s friend?”

“She used to be, like, the only kid he ever hung around with,” Derek explained, “but then she became one of the cool kids, and she ditched him.” He looked at Selena. “Peter didn’t care, really. He said she’d turned into a bitch.”

“Derek!”

“Sorry, Mom,” he said. “But again, it’s true.”

“Would you excuse me?” Selena asked.

She walked out of the kitchen and into the bathroom, where she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and dialed home. “It’s me,” she said when Jordan answered, and then she hesitated. “Why is it so quiet?”

“Sam’s asleep.”

“You didn’t pop in another Wiggles video just to get your discovery read, did you?”

“Did you call specifically to accuse me of lousy parenting?”

“No,” Selena said. “I called to tell you that Peter and Josie used to be best friends.”

In maximum security, Peter was allowed only one real visitor a week, but certain people didn’t count. For example, your lawyer could come and see you as many times as necessary. And-here’s the crazy thing-so could reporters. All Peter had to do was sign a little release that said he was willingly making the choice to speak to the media, and Elena Battista was allowed to meet him.

She was hot. Peter noticed that right away. Instead of wearing some shapeless oversized sweater, she had dressed in a tight blouse with buttons. If he leaned forward, he could even see cleavage.

She had long, thick curly hair and doe-brown eyes, and Peter found it really hard to believe that she had ever been teased by anyone in high school. But she was sitting in front of him, that much was true, and she could barely look him in the eyes. “I can’t believe this,” she said, her toes coming right up to the red line that separated them. “I can’t believe I’m actually meeting you.”

Peter pretended he heard this all the time. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s cool that you drove up here.”

“Oh, God, that was the least I could do,” Elena said. Peter thought of stories he’d heard, of groupies who’d written to inmates and eventually married them in a prison ceremony. He thought of the correctional officer who’d brought Elena in, and wondered if he was telling everyone else that Peter Houghton had some hot girl visiting him.

“You don’t mind if I take notes, do you?” Elena asked. “For my paper?”

“That’s cool.”

He watched her pull out a pencil and hold the cap in her mouth while she opened her notebook to a fresh page. “So, like I told you, I’m writing about the effects of bullying.”

“How come?”

“Well, there were times when I was in high school that I thought I’d rather just kill myself than go back to class the next day, because it would be easier. I figured if I was thinking it, there had to be other people thinking it, too…and that’s where I came up with the idea.” She leaned forward-cleavage alert-and met Peter’s eyes. “I’m hoping I can get it published in a psychology journal or something.”

“That would be cool.” He winced; God, how many times was he going to use the word cool? He probably sounded like a total retard.

“So, maybe you could start by telling me how often it used to happen. The bullying, I mean.”

“Every day, I guess.”

“What sorts of things did they do?”

“The usual,” Peter said. “Stuffing me into a locker, throwing my books out the bus window.” He gave her a litany he’d already given Jordan a thousand times: memories of being elbowed on his way up a staircase, moments where his glasses were ripped off and crushed, slurs pitched like fastballs.

Elena’s eyes melted. “That must have been so hard for you.”

Peter didn’t know what to say. He wanted her to stay interested in his story, but not if it meant that she thought he was a total wimp. He shrugged, hoping that was a good enough response.

She stopped writing. “Peter, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Even if it’s kind of off topic?”

Peter nodded.

“Did you plan to kill them?”

She was leaning forward again, her lips parted, as if whatever Peter was about to say was some wafer, a communion host that she’d been waiting for her whole life. Peter could hear the footsteps of a guard walking past the doorway behind him, could practically taste Elena’s breath through the receiver. He wanted to give her the right answer-sound dangerous enough for her to be intrigued, to want to come back.

He smiled, in a way that he hoped was sort of seductive. “Let’s just say it needed to stop,” Peter answered.

The magazines in Jordan’s dentist’s office had the shelf life of plutonium. They were so old that the celebrity bride on the cover now had two babies named for biblical characters, or pieces of fruit; that the president listed as Man of the Year had already left office. To that end, when he stumbled upon the latest issue of Time while awaiting his appointment for a filling, Jordan felt like he’d hit the mother lode.

HIGH SCHOOL: THE NEWEST FRONT LINE FOR BATTLE? the cover read, and there was a still image of Sterling High from a chopper, kids still streaming out of all the building’s orifices. He absently leafed toward the article and its subsections, not expecting to see anything he didn’t already know or hadn’t already seen in the papers, but one piece caught his eye. “Inside the Mind of a Killer,” he read, and he saw the much-used school picture of Peter from his eighth-grade yearbook.

Then he started to read.

“Goddamn,” he said, and he got to his feet, starting for the door.

“Mr. McAfee,” the secretary said, “the dentist is ready for you.”

“I’ll have to reschedule-”

“Well, you can’t take our magazine…”

“Add it to my bill,” Jordan snapped, and he hurried downstairs to his car. His cell phone rang just as he turned the key in the ignition-he completely expected it to be Diana Leven, gloating over her good fortune-but instead, it was Selena.

“Hey, are you done at the dentist? I need you to swing by CVS and grab some diapers on the way home. I ran out.”

“I’m not coming home. I’ve got bigger problems right now.”

“Honey,” Selena said, “there are no bigger problems.”

“I’ll explain later,” Jordan said, and he turned off his phone, so that even if Diana called, she wouldn’t be able to reach him.

He got to the jail in twenty-six minutes-a personal record-and stormed into the entryway. There, he plastered the magazine up to the plastic that separated him from the CO who was signing him in. “I need to bring this in when I see my client,” Jordan said.

“Well, I’m sorry,” the officer said, “but you can’t take in anything that’s got staples.”

Frustrated, Jordan balanced the magazine against his leg and ripped out the binding staples. “Fine. Can I see my client now?”

He was brought to the same conference room he always used at the jail, and he paced while he waited for Peter to arrive. When he did, Jordan slammed the magazine down on the table, open to the article. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

Peter’s mouth dropped open. “She…she never mentioned that she wrote for Time!” He scanned the pages. “I can’t believe it,” he murmured.

Jordan could feel all the blood in his body rushing to his head. Surely, this was how people had strokes. “Do you have any idea how serious the charges against you are? How awful your case is? How much evidence there is against you?” He smacked an open hand on the article. “Do you really think that this makes you look at all sympathetic?”

Peter scowled. “Well, thanks for the lecture. Maybe if you’d been here to deliver it a few weeks ago we wouldn’t be having this discussion at all.”

“Oh, that’s priceless,” Jordan said. “I don’t come by often enough, so you decide to get back at me by talking to the media?”

“She wasn’t the media. She was my friend.”

“Guess what,” Jordan said. “You don’t get to have any friends.”

“So what else is new?” Peter shot back.

Jordan opened his mouth to yell at Peter again, but couldn’t. The truth of the statement struck him, as he remembered Selena’s interview earlier this week with Derek Markowitz. Peter’s buddies deserted him, or betrayed him, or spilled his secrets for a circulation of millions.

If he really wanted to do his job right, he couldn’t just be an attorney to Peter. He had to be his confidant, and to date, all he’d done was string the kid along, just like everyone else in his life.

Jordan sat down next to Peter. “Look,” he said quietly. “You can’t do anything like this again. If anyone contacts you at all, for any reason, you need to tell me. And in return, I’ll come to see you more often than I have been. Okay?”

Peter shrugged his agreement. For a long moment they both sat beside each other, silent, unsure of what came next.

“So now what?” Peter asked. “Do I have to talk about Joey again? Or prep for that psychiatric interview?”

Jordan hesitated. The only reason he’d come to see Peter was to tear into him for talking to a reporter; if not for that, he wouldn’t have come to the jail at all. And he supposed he could ask Peter to recount his childhood or his school history or his feelings about being bullied, but somehow, that didn’t seem right either. “Actually, I need some advice,” he said. “My wife got me this computer game last Christmas, Agents of Stealth? The thing is, I can’t make it past the first level without getting wiped out.”

Peter glanced at him sideways. “Well, are you registering as a Droid or a Regal?”

Who the hell knew? He hadn’t taken the CD out of its box. “A Droid.”

“That’s your first mistake. See, you can’t enlist in the Pyrhphorus Legion-you need to get appointed to serve. The way to do that is by starting off in the Educationary instead of the Mines. Understand?”

Jordan glanced down at the article, still spread on the table. His case had just grown immeasurably more difficult, but maybe that was offset by the fact that his relationship with his client had gotten easier. “Yeah,” Jordan said. “I’m starting to.”

“You’re not going to like this,” Eleanor said, handing a document to Alex.

“Why not?”

“It’s a motion to recuse yourself from the Houghton case. The prosecution strongly requests a hearing.”

A hearing meant that press would be present, the victims would be present, the families would be present. It meant that Alex would be under public scrutiny before this case could go any further. “Well, she’s not getting one,” Alex said dismissively.

The clerk hesitated. “I’d think twice about that.”

Alex met her eyes. “You can leave now.”

She waited for Eleanor to close the door behind herself, and then she closed her eyes. She didn’t know what to do. It was true that she’d been more rattled during the arraignment than she’d anticipated. It was true, too, that the distance between herself and Josie could be measured by the very parameters of her role as judge. Yet because Alex had steadfastly assumed that she was infallible-because she’d been so sure that she could be a fair justice on this case-she’d gotten herself into a catch-22. It was one thing to recuse yourself before the proceedings started. But if she backed out now, it would make her seem flighty (at best) or inept (at worst). Neither one of those was an adjective she wanted associated with her judicial career.

If she didn’t give Diana Leven the hearing she was requesting, it would look like Alex was hiding. Better to let them voice their positions and be a big girl. Alex pushed a button on her phone. “Eleanor,” she said, “schedule it.”

She speared her fingers through her hair and then smoothed it down again. What she needed was a cigarette. She rummaged in her desk drawers but turned up only an empty pack of Merits. “Shoot,” she muttered, and then remembered her emergency pack, hidden in the trunk of her car. Grabbing her keys, Alex stood up and left chambers, hurrying down the back staircase to the parking lot.

She threw open the fire door and heard the sickening crunch as it hit flesh. “Oh my gosh,” she cried, reaching for the man who’d doubled over in pain. “Are you all right?”

Patrick Ducharme straightened, wincing. “Your Honor,” he said. “I’ve got to stop running into you. Literally.”

She frowned. “You shouldn’t have been standing next to a fire door.”

“You shouldn’t have been flinging it open. So where is it today?” Patrick asked.

“Where’s what?”

“The fire?” He nodded at another cop, walking to a cruiser parked in the lot.

Alex took a step backward and folded her arms. “I believe we already had a conversation about, well, conversation.”

“First of all, we’re not talking about the case, unless there’s some metaphorical thing going on that I don’t know about. Second of all, your position on this case seems to be in doubt, at least if you believe the editorial in the Sterling News today.”

“There’s an editorial about me today?” Alex said, stunned. “What does it say?”

“Well, I’d tell you, but that would be talking about the case, wouldn’t it?” He grinned and started to walk off.

“Hang on,” Alex said, calling after the detective. When he turned, she glanced around to make sure that they were alone in the parking lot. “Can I ask you something? Off the record?”

He nodded slowly.

“Did Josie seem…I don’t know…all right to you, when you talked to her the other day?”

The detective leaned against the brick wall of the court building. “You certainly know her better than I do.”

“Well…sure,” Alex said. “I just thought she might say something to you-as a stranger-that she wasn’t willing to say to me.” She looked down at the ground between them. “Sometimes it’s easier that way.”

She could feel Patrick’s eyes on her, but she couldn’t quite muster the courage to meet them. “Can I tell you something? Off the record?”

Alex nodded.

“Before I took this job, I used to work in Maine. And I had a case that wasn’t just a case, if you know what I mean.”

Alex did. She found herself listening in his voice for a note she hadn’t heard before-a low one that resonated with anguish, like a tuning fork that never stopped its vibration. “There was a woman there who meant everything to me, and she had a little boy who meant everything to her. And when he was hurt, in a way a kid never should be, I moved heaven and earth to work that case, because I thought no one could possibly do a better job than I could. No one could possibly care more about the outcome.” He looked directly at Alex. “I was so sure I could separate how I felt about what had happened from how I had to do my job.”

Alex swallowed, dry as dust. “And did you?”

“No. Because when you love someone, no matter what you tell yourself, it stops being a job.”

“What does it become?”

Patrick thought for a moment. “Revenge.”

One morning, when Lewis had told Lacy he was headed to visit Peter at the jail, she got in her car and followed him. In the days since Peter had confessed that his father didn’t come to see him, through the arraignment and afterward, Lacy had kept this secret hidden. She spoke less and less to Lewis, because she feared that once she opened her mouth, it would escape like a hurricane.

Lacy was careful to keep one car between hers and Lewis’s. It made her think of a lifetime ago, when they had been dating, and she would follow Lewis to his apartment or he would follow her. They’d play games with each other, waving the rear windshield wiper like a dog wags its tail, flashing headlights in Morse code.

He drove north, as if he was going to the jail, and for a moment Lacy had a crisis of doubt: would Peter have lied to her, for some reason? She didn’t think so. But then again, she hadn’t thought Lewis would, either.

It started to rain just as they reached the green in Lyme Center. Lewis signaled and turned into a small parking lot with a bank, an artist’s studio, a flower shop. She couldn’t pull in behind him-he’d recognize her car right away-so instead she drove into the lot of the hardware store next door and parked behind the building.

Maybe he needs the ATM, Lacy thought, but she got out of her car and hid behind the oil tanks to watch Lewis enter a floral shop, and leave five minutes later with a bouquet of pink roses.

All the breath left her body. Was he having an affair? She had never considered the possibility that things could get even worse, that their small family unit could fracture further.

Lacy stumbled into her car and managed to follow Lewis. It was true, she had been obsessed with Peter’s trial. And maybe she had been guilty of not listening to Lewis when he needed to talk, because nothing he had to say about economics seminars or publications or current events really seemed to matter anymore, not when her son was sitting in jail. But Lewis? She’d always imagined herself as the free spirit in their union; she’d seen him as the anchor. Security was a mirage; being tied down hardly counted when the other end of the rope had unraveled.

She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. Lewis would tell her, of course, that it was only sex, not love. That it didn’t mean anything. He would say that there were all sorts of ways that people dealt with grief, with a hole in the heart.

Lewis put on his blinker again and turned right-this time, into a cemetery.

A slow burn started inside Lacy’s chest. Well, this was just sick. Was this where he met her?

Lewis got out of the car, carrying his roses but no umbrella. The rain was coming down harder now, but Lacy was intent on seeing this through to the end. She stayed just far enough behind, following him to a newer section of the cemetery, the one with the freshest graves. There weren’t even headstones yet; the plots looked like a patchwork: brown earth against the green of the clipped lawn.

At the first grave, Lewis knelt and placed a rose on the soil. Then he moved to another one, doing the same. And another, and another, until his hair was dripping into his face; until his shirt was soaked through; until he’d left behind ten flowers.

Lacy came up behind him as he was placing the last rose. “I know you’re there,” he said, although he didn’t turn around.

She could barely speak: the understanding that Lewis was not, in fact, cheating on her had been tempered by the knowledge of what he was actually spending his time doing these days. She couldn’t tell if she was crying anymore, or if the sky was doing it for her. “How dare you come here,” she accused, “and not visit your own son?”

He lifted his face to hers. “Do you know what chaos theory is?”

“I don’t give a fuck about chaos theory, Lewis. I care about Peter. Which is more than I can say for-”

“There’s this belief,” he interrupted, “that you can explain only the last moment in time, linearly…but that everything leading up to it might have come from any series of events. So, you know, a kid skips a stone at the beach, and somewhere across the planet, a tsunami happens.” Lewis stood up, his hands in his pockets. “I took him hunting, Lacy. I told him to stick with the sport, even if he didn’t like it. I said a thousand things. What if one of them was what made Peter do this?”

He doubled over, sobbing. As Lacy reached for him, the rain drummed over her shoulders and back.

“We did the best we could,” Lacy said.

“It wasn’t good enough.” Lewis jerked his head in the direction of the graves. “Look at this. Look at this.”

Lacy did. Through the driving downpour, with her hair and clothes plastered to her, she took stock of the graveyard and saw the faces of the children who would still be alive, if her own son had never been born.

Lacy put her hand over her abdomen. The pain cut her in half, like a magician’s trick, except she knew she would never really be put back together.

One of her sons had been doing drugs. The other was a murderer. Had she and Lewis been the wrong parents for the boys they’d had? Or should they never have been parents at all?

Children didn’t make their own mistakes. They plunged into the pits they’d been led to by their parents. She and Lewis had truly believed they were headed the right way, but maybe they should have stopped to ask for directions. Maybe then they would never have had to watch Joey-and then Peter-take that one tragic step and free-fall.

Lacy remembered holding Joey’s grades up against Peter’s; telling Peter that maybe he should try out for soccer, because Joey had enjoyed it so much. Acceptance started at home, but so did intolerance. By the time Peter had been excluded at school, Lacy realized, he was used to feeling like an outcast in his own family.

Lacy squeezed her eyes shut. For the rest of her life, she’d be known as Peter Houghton’s mother. At one point, that would have thrilled her-but you had to be careful what you wished for. Taking credit for what a child did well also meant accepting responsibility for what they did wrong. And to Lacy, that meant that instead of making reparations to these victims, she and Lewis needed to start closer to home-with Peter.

“He needs us,” Lacy said. “More than ever.”

Lewis shook his head. “I can’t go to see Peter.”

She drew away. “Why?”

“Because I still think, every day, of the drunk who crashed into Joey’s car. I think of how much I wished he’d died instead of Joey; how he deserved to die. The parents of every one of these kids is thinking the same thing about Peter,” Lewis said. “And Lacy…I don’t blame a single one of them.”

Lacy stepped back, shivering. Lewis wadded up the paper cone that had held the flowers and stuffed it into his pocket. The rain fell between them like a curtain, making it impossible for them to see each other clearly.

Jordan waited at a pizza place near the jail for King Wah to arrive after his psychiatric interview with Peter. He was ten minutes late, and Jordan wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

King blew through the door on a gust of wind, his raincoat billowing out behind him. He slid into the booth where Jordan was sitting and picked up a slice of pizza on Jordan’s plate. “You can do this,” he pronounced, and he took a bite. “Psychologically, there isn’t a significant difference between the treatment of a victim of bullying over time and the treatment of an adult female in battered woman syndrome. The bottom line for both is post-traumatic stress disorder.” He put the crust back on Jordan’s plate. “You know what Peter told me?”

Jordan thought about his client for a moment. “That it sucks being in jail?”

“Well, they all say that. He told me that he would rather have died than spend another day thinking about what could happen to him at school. Who does that sound like?”

“Katie Riccobono,” Jordan said. “After she decided to give her husband a triple bypass with a steak knife.”

“Katie Riccobono,” King corrected, “poster child for battered woman syndrome.”

“So Peter becomes the first example of bullied victim syndrome,” Jordan said. “Be honest with me, King. You think a jury is going to identify with a syndrome that doesn’t even really exist?”

“A jury’s not made up of battered women, but they’ve been known to acquit them before. On the other hand, every single member of that jury will have been through high school.” He reached for Jordan’s Coke and took a sip. “Did you know that a single incident of bullying in childhood can be as traumatic to a person, over time, as a single incident of sexual abuse?”

“You gotta be kidding me.”

“Think about it. The common denominator is being humiliated. What’s the strongest memory you have from high school?”

Jordan had to think for a moment before any memory of high school even clouded its way into his mind, much less a salient one. Then he started to grin. “I was in Phys. Ed., and doing a fitness test. Part of it involved climbing a rope that was hung from the ceiling. In high school, I didn’t have quite the massive physique I have now-”

King snorted. “Naturally.”

“-so I was already worried about not making it to the top. As it turned out, that wasn’t a problem. It was coming back down, because climbing up with the rope between my legs, I got a massive boner.”

“There you go,” King said. “Ask ten people, and half of them won’t even be able to remember something concrete from high school-they’ve blocked it out. The other half will recall an incredibly painful or embarrassing moment. They stick like glue.”

“That is incredibly depressing,” Jordan pointed out.

“Well, most of us grow up and realize that in the grand scheme of life, these incidents are a tiny part of the puzzle.”

“And the ones who don’t?”

King glanced at Jordan. “They turn out like Peter.”

The reason Alex was in Josie’s closet in the first place was because Josie had borrowed her black skirt and never returned it, and Alex needed it tonight. She was meeting someone for dinner-Whit Hobart-her former boss, who’d retired from the public defender’s office. After today’s hearing, where the prosecution had made its motion to have her recused, she needed some advice.

She’d found the skirt, but she’d also found a trove of treasures. Alex sat on the floor with a box open in her lap. The fringe of Josie’s old jazz costume, from lessons she’d taken when she was six or seven, fell into her palm like a whisper. The silk was cool to the touch. It was puddled on top of a faux fur tiger costume that Josie had worn one Halloween and kept for dress-up-Alex’s first and last foray into sewing. Halfway through, she’d given up and soldered the fabric together with a hot glue gun. Alex had planned to take Josie trick-or-treating that year, but she’d been a public defender at the time, and one of her clients had been arrested again. Josie had gone out with the neighbor and her children; and that night, when Alex finally got home, Josie had spilled her pillowcase of candy on the bed. You can take half, Josie told her, because you missed all the fun.

She thumbed through the atlas Josie had made in first grade, coloring every continent and then laminating the pages; she read her report cards. She found a hair elastic and looped it around her wrist. At the bottom of the box was a note, written in the loopy script of a little girl: Deer Mom I love you a lot XOXO.

Alex let her fingers trace the letters. She wondered why Josie still had this in her possession; why it had never been given to its addressee. Had Josie been waiting, and forgotten? Had she been angry at Alex for something and decided not to give it at all?

Alex stood, then carefully put the box back where she’d found it. She folded the black skirt over her arm and headed toward her own bedroom. Most parents, she knew, went through their child’s things in search of condoms and baggies of pot, to try to catch them in the act. For Alex, it was different. For Alex, going through Josie’s possessions was a way of holding on to everything she’d missed.

The sad truth about being single was that Patrick couldn’t justify going to all the bother to cook for himself. He ate most of his meals standing over the sink, so what was the point of making a mess with dozens of pots and pans and fresh ingredients? It wasn’t as if he was going to turn to himself and say, Patrick, great recipe, where’d you find it?

He had it down to a science, really. Monday was pizza night. Tuesday, Subway. Wednesday was Chinese; Thursday, soup; and Friday, he got a burger at the bar where he usually grabbed a beer before heading home. Weekends were for leftovers, and there were always plenty. Sometimes, it got downright lonely ordering (was there any sadder phrase in the English language than Pupu platter for one?), but for the most part, his routine had netted him a collection of friends. Sal at the pizza place gave him garlic knots for free, because he was a regular. The Subway guy, whose name Patrick didn’t know, would point at him and grin. “Hearty-Italian-turkey-cheese-mayo-olives-extra-pickles-salt-and-pepper,” he’d call out, the verbal equivalent of their secret handshake.

This being a Wednesday, he was at the Golden Dragon, waiting for his take-out order to be filled. He watched May ferry it into the kitchen (where on earth did someone buy a wok that big, he always wondered) and turned his attention to the television over the bar, where the Sox game was just beginning. A woman was sitting alone, tearing a fringe around the edge of a cocktail napkin as she waited for the bartender to bring her her drink.

She had her back to him, but Patrick was a detective, and there were certain things he could figure out just from this side of her. Like the fact that she had a great ass, for one, and that her hair needed to be taken out of that librarian’s bun so that it could wave around her shoulders. He watched the bartender (a Korean named Spike, which always struck Patrick as funny after the first Tsingtao) opening up a bottle of pinot noir, and he filed away this information, too: she was classy. Nothing with a little paper umbrella in it, not for her.

He sidled up behind the woman and handed Spike a twenty. “My treat,” Patrick said.

She turned, and for a fraction of a second, Patrick stood rooted to the spot, wondering how this mystery woman could possibly have Judge Cormier’s face.

It reminded Patrick of being in high school and seeing a friend’s mom from a distance across a parking lot and automatically checking her out as a Potential Hot Babe until he realized who it actually was. The judge plucked the twenty-dollar bill out of Spike’s hand and gave it back to Patrick. “You can’t buy me a drink,” she said, and she pulled some cash out of her pocketbook and handed it to the bartender.

Patrick sat down on the stool beside her. “Well, then,” he said. “You can buy me one.”

“I don’t think so.” She glanced around the restaurant. “I really don’t think we ought to be seen talking.”

“The only witnesses are the koi in the pond by the cash register. I think you’re safe,” Patrick said. “Besides, we’re just talking. We’re not talking about the case. You do still remember how to make conversation outside a courtroom, don’t you?”

She picked up her glass of wine. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

Patrick lowered his voice. “I’m running a drug bust on the Chinese mafia. They import raw opium in the sugar packets.”

Her eyes widened. “Honestly?”

“No. And would I tell you if it were true?” He smiled. “I’m just waiting for my take-out order. What about you?”

“I’m waiting for someone.”

He didn’t realize, until she’d said it, that he’d been enjoying her company. He got a kick out of flustering her, which, truthfully, wasn’t really all that hard. Judge Cormier reminded him of the Great and Powerful Oz: all bluster and bells and whistles, but when you pulled back the curtain, she was just an ordinary woman.

Who happened to have a great ass.

He felt heat rise to his face. “Happy family,” Patrick said.

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what I ordered. I was just trying to help you out with that casual conversation thing again.”

“You only got one dish? No one goes to a Chinese restaurant and only gets one dish.”

“Well, not all of us have growing kids at home.”

She traced the lip of her wineglass with one finger. “You don’t have any?”

“Never married.”

“Why not?”

Patrick shook his head, smiling faintly. “I’m not getting into that.”

“Boy,” the judge said. “She must have done a job on you.”

His jaw dropped open. Was he really that easy to read?

“Guess you haven’t cornered the market on those amazing detective skills,” she said, laughing. “Except we call it women’s intuition.”

“Yeah, that’ll get you your gold shield in no time.” He glanced at her ringless hand. “Why aren’t you married?”

The judge repeated his own answer. “I’m not getting into that.”

She sipped her wine in silence for a moment, and Patrick tapped his fingers on the wood of the bar. “She was already married,” he admitted.

The judge set her glass down, empty. “So was he,” she confessed, and when Patrick turned to her, she looked him right in the eye.

Hers were the pale gray that made you think of nightfall and silver bullets and the edge of winter. The color that filled the sky before it was torn in half by lightning.

Patrick had never noticed this before, and suddenly he realized why. “You’re not wearing glasses.”

“I sure am glad to know Sterling’s got someone as sharp as you protecting and serving them.”

“You usually wear glasses.”

“Only when I’m working. I need them to read.”

And when I usually see you, you’re working.

That was why he hadn’t noticed before that Alex Cormier was attractive: before this, when they crossed paths, she was in full buttoned-up judge mode. She had not been curled over the bar like a hothouse flower. She had not been quite so…human.

“Alex!” The voice came from behind them. The man was spiffy, in a good suit and wingtips, with just enough gray hair at his temples to look distinguished. He had lawyer written all over him. He was no doubt rich and divorced; the kind of guy who would sit up at night and talk about penal code before making love; the kind of guy who slept on his side of the bed instead of with his arms wrapped so tight around her that even after falling asleep, they stayed tangled.

Jesus Christ, Patrick thought, looking down at the ground. Where did that come from?

What did he care who Alex Cormier dated, even if the guy was practically old enough to be her father?

“Whit,” she said, “I’m so glad you could come.” She kissed him on the cheek and then, still holding his hand, turned to Patrick. “Whit, this is Detective Patrick Ducharme. Patrick, Whit Hobart.”

The man had a good handshake, which only pissed Patrick off even more. Patrick waited to see what else the judge was going to say about him by way of introduction. But then, what options did she have? Patrick wasn’t an old friend. He wasn’t someone she’d met sitting at the bar. She couldn’t even say that they were both involved with the Houghton trial, because in that case, he shouldn’t have been talking to her.

Which, Patrick realized, is what she’d been trying to tell him all along.

May appeared from the kitchen, holding a paper bag folded and neatly stapled. “Here you go, Pat,” she said. “We see you next week, okay?”

He could feel the judge staring. “Happy family,” she said, offering a consolation prize, the smallest of smiles.

“Nice seeing you, Your Honor,” Patrick said politely. He threw the door of the restaurant open so hard that it banged on its hinges against the outside wall. He was halfway to his car when he realized he wasn’t even really hungry anymore.

The lead story on the local news at 11:00 p.m. was the hearing at the superior court to get Judge Cormier removed from the case. Jordan and Selena sat in bed in the dark, each with a bowl of cereal balanced on their stomachs, watching the tearful mother of a paraplegic girl cry into the television camera. “No one’s speaking for our children,” she said. “If this case gets messed up because of some legal snafu…well, they aren’t strong enough to go through it twice.”

“Neither’s Peter,” Jordan pointed out.

Selena put down her spoon. “Cormier’s gonna sit on that case if she has to crawl her way to the bench.”

“Well, I can’t very well get someone to gilhooly her kneecaps, can I?”

“Let’s look at the bright side,” Selena said. “Nothing in Josie’s statement can hurt Peter.”

“My God, you’re right.” Jordan sat up so quickly that he sloshed milk onto the quilt. He set his bowl on the nightstand. “It’s brilliant.”

“What is?”

“Diana’s not calling Josie as a witness for the prosecution, because she’s got nothing they can use. But there’s nothing to stop me from calling her as a witness for the defense.”

“Are you kidding? You’re going to put the judge’s daughter on your witness list?”

“Why not? She used to be Peter’s friend. He’s got precious few of them. It’s all in good faith.”

“You wouldn’t really-”

“Nah, I’m sure I’ll never use her. But the prosecutor doesn’t need to know that.” He grinned at Diana. “And incidentally…neither does the judge.”

Selena set her bowl aside, too. “If you put Josie on your witness list…Cormier has to step down.”

“Exactly.”

Selena reached forward, bracketing his face with her palms to plant a kiss on his lips. “You’re awfully good.”

“What was that?”

“You heard me the first time.”

“I know,” Jordan grinned, “but I wouldn’t mind hearing it again.”

The quilt slipped down as he wrapped his arms around her. “Greedy li’l thing, aren’t you,” Selena murmured.

“Isn’t that what made you fall in love with me?”

Selena laughed. “Well, it wasn’t your charm and grace, honey.”

Jordan leaned over her, kissing Selena until-he hoped-she had forgotten she was in the throes of making fun of him. “Let’s have another baby,” he whispered.

“I’m still nursing the first one!”

“Then let’s practice having another one.”

There was no one in the world quite like his wife, Jordan thought-statuesque and stunning, smarter than he was (not that he’d ever admit it to her face), and so perfectly attuned to him that he nearly had to concede his skepticism and believe that psychics truly did walk among us. He buried his face in the spot he loved best on Selena: the part where the nape of her neck ran into her shoulder, where her skin was the color of maple syrup and tasted even sweeter.

“Jordan?” she said. “Do you ever worry about our kids? I mean…you know. Doing what you do…and seeing what we see?”

He rolled onto his back. “Well,” he said. “That certainly killed the moment.”

“I’m serious.”

Jordan sighed. “Of course I think about it. I worry about Thomas. And Sam. And whoever else might come along.” He came up on an elbow so that he could find her eyes in the dark. “But then I figure that’s the reason we had them.”

“How so?”

He looked over Selena’s shoulder, to the blinking green eye of the baby monitor. “Maybe,” Jordan said, “they’re the ones who’ll change the world.”

Whit hadn’t really made up Alex’s mind for her; that had already been done when she met him for dinner. But he’d been the salve she needed for her wounds, the justification she was afraid to give herself. You’ll get another big case, eventually, he had said. You won’t get back this moment with Josie.

She walked into chambers briskly, mostly because she knew that this was the easy part. Divorcing herself from the case, writing the motion to recuse herself-that was not nearly as terrifying as what would happen tomorrow, when she was no longer the judge on the Houghton case.

When, instead, she had to be a mother.

Eleanor was nowhere to be found, but she’d left Alex the paperwork on her desk. She sat down and scanned it.

Jordan McAfee, who yesterday hadn’t even opened his mouth at the hearing, was noticing up his intention to call Josie as a witness.

She felt a fire spark in her belly. It was an emotion Alex didn’t even have words for-the animal instinct that came when you realized someone you love has been taken hostage.

McAfee had committed the grievous sin of dragging Josie into this, and Alex’s mind spiraled wildly as she wondered what she could do to get him fired, or even disbarred. Come to think of it, she didn’t even really care if retribution came within the confines of the law or outside it. But suddenly, Alex stilled. It wasn’t Jordan McAfee she’d chase to the ends of the earth-it was Josie. She’d do anything to keep her daughter from being hurt again.

Maybe she should thank Jordan McAfee for making her realize that she already had the raw material in her to be a good mother, after all.

Alex sat down at her laptop and began to type. Her heart was hammering as she walked out to the clerk’s desk and handed the sheet of paper to Eleanor; but that was normal, wasn’t it, when you were about to leap off a cliff?

“You need to call Judge Wagner,” Alex said.

It wasn’t Patrick who needed the search warrant. But when he heard another officer talking about swinging by the courthouse, he interceded. “I’m headed out that way,” he’d said. “I’ll do it for you.”

In truth, he hadn’t been heading toward the courthouse, at least not until he’d volunteered. And he wasn’t such a Samaritan that he’d drive forty miles out of the goodness of his heart. Patrick wanted to go there for one reason only: it was another excuse to see Alex Cormier.

He pulled into an empty spot and got out of his car, immediately spotting her Honda. This was a good thing; for all he knew, she might not even have been in court today. But then he did a double take as he realized that someone was in the car…and that that someone was the judge.

She wasn’t moving, just staring out the windshield. The wipers were on, but it wasn’t raining. It looked like she didn’t even realize she was crying.

He felt that same uneasy sway in the pit of his stomach that usually came when he’d reached a crime scene and saw a victim’s tears. I’m too late, he thought. Again.

Patrick approached the car, but the judge must not have seen him coming. When he knocked on the window, she jumped a foot and hurriedly wiped her eyes. He mimed for her to roll down the window. “Everything okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“Then stop looking,” she snapped.

He hooked his fingers over the curl of the car door. “Listen. You want to go somewhere and talk? I’ll buy you coffee.”

The judge sighed. “You can’t buy me coffee.”

“Well, we can still get some.” He stood up and walked around to the passenger door, opened it, slid into the seat beside her.

“You’re on duty,” she pointed out.

“I’m taking my lunch break.”

“At ten in the morning?”

He reached across the console to the keys, dangling in the ignition, and started the car. “Head out of the parking lot and take a left, all right?”

“Or what?”

“For God’s sake, don’t you know better than to argue with someone who’s wearing a Glock?”

She looked at him for a long moment. “You couldn’t possibly be carjacking me,” the judge said, but she started driving, as he’d asked.

“Remind me to arrest myself later,” Patrick said.

Alex had been raised by her father to give everything her best shot, and apparently, that included falling off the deep end. Why not recuse herself from the biggest trial of her career, ask for administrative leave, and go out for coffee with the detective on the case all in one fell swoop?

Then again, she told herself, if she hadn’t gone out with Patrick Ducharme, she would never have known that the Golden Dragon Chinese restaurant opened for business at 10:00 a.m.

If she hadn’t gone out with him, she would have had to drive home and start her life over.

Everyone at the restaurant seemed to know the detective and didn’t mind him going into the kitchen to get Alex her cup of coffee. “What you saw back there,” Alex said hesitantly. “You won’t…”

“Tell anyone you were having a little breakdown in your car?”

She looked down at the mug he set in front of her, not even really knowing how to respond. In her experience, the moment you showed you were weak in front of someone, they’d use it against you. “It’s hard to be a judge sometimes. People expect you to act like one, even when you’ve got the flu and feel like crawling up into a ball and dying, or cursing out the cashier who shortchanged you on purpose. There’s not a lot of room for mistakes.”

“Your secret’s safe,” Patrick said. “I won’t tell anyone in the law enforcement community that you’ve actually got emotions.”

Alex took a sip of the coffee, then looked up at him. “Sugar?”

Patrick folded his arms on the bar and leaned toward her. “Darling?” At her expression, he started to laugh, and then handed her the bowl. “Honestly, it’s no big deal. We all have lousy days at work.”

“Do you sit in your car and cry?”

“Not recently, but I have been known to overturn evidence lockers during fits of frustration.” He poured milk into a creamer and set it down. “You know, it’s not mutually exclusive.”

“What’s not?”

“Being a judge and being human.”

Alex added the milk to her mug. “Tell that to everyone who wants me to recuse myself.”

“Isn’t this the part where you tell me we can’t talk about the case?”

“Yes,” Alex said. “Except I’m not on the case anymore. As of noon, it’ll be public knowledge.”

He sobered. “Is that why you were upset?”

“No. I’d already made the decision to leave the case. But then I got word that Josie’s on the witness list for the defense.”

“Why?” Patrick said. “She doesn’t remember anything. What could she possibly say?”

“I don’t know.” Alex glanced up. “But what if it’s my fault? What if the lawyer only did that to get me off the case because I was too stubborn to recuse myself when the issue was first raised?” To her great shame, she realized she was starting to cry again, and she stared down at the bar in the hope that Patrick would not notice. “What if she has to get up in front of everyone in court and relive that whole day?” Patrick passed her a cocktail napkin, and she wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m not usually like this.”

“Any mother whose daughter came that close to dying has a right to fall apart at the seams,” Patrick said. “Look. I’ve talked to Josie twice. I know her statement back and forth. It doesn’t matter if McAfee puts her on the stand-there’s nothing she can say that’s going to hurt her. The silver lining is that now you don’t have to worry about a conflict of interest. Josie needs a good mother right now more than she needs a good judge.”

Alex smiled ruefully. “What a shame she’s stuck with me instead.”

“Come on.”

“It’s true. My whole life with Josie has been a series of disconnects.”

“Well,” Patrick pointed out, “that presumes that at one point, you were connected.”

“Neither of us remembers back that far. You’ve had better conversations with Josie than I have lately.” Alex stared into the mug of coffee. “Everything I say to Josie comes out wrong. She looks at me like I’m from another planet. Like I have no right to act like a concerned parent now because I wasn’t acting like one before it happened.”

“Why weren’t you?”

“I was working. Hard,” Alex said.

“Lots of parents work hard-”

“But I’m good at being a judge. And lousy at being a mother.” Alex covered her mouth with her hand, but it was too late to take back the truth, which coiled on the bar in front of her, poisonous. What had she been thinking, confessing that to someone when she could barely admit it to herself? She might as well have drawn a bull’s-eye on her Achilles’ heel.

“Maybe you should try talking to Josie the way you talk to the people who come into your court, then,” Patrick suggested.

“She hates it when I act like a lawyer. Besides, I hardly talk in court. Mostly, I listen.”

“Well, Your Honor,” Patrick said. “That might work, too.”

Once, when Josie had been a baby, Alex let her out of her sight long enough for Josie to climb up on a stool. From across the room, Alex watched in terror as Josie’s slight weight upset the balance. She couldn’t get there fast enough to keep Josie from falling; she didn’t want to yell out, because she was afraid that if she startled Josie, that would make her fall, too. So Alex had stood, waiting for an accident to happen.

But instead, Josie managed to perch herself on the stool; to stand up on its little disc seat; to reach the light switch she’d been heading for all along. Alex watched her flick the lights on and off, watched her face split with a smile every time she realized that her actions could transform the world.

“Since we’re not in court,” she said hesitantly, “I’d like it if you called me Alex.”

Patrick smiled. “And I’d like it if you called me Your Majesty King Kamehameha.”

Alex couldn’t help herself; she laughed.

“But if that’s too hard to remember, Patrick would be fine.” He reached for the coffeepot and poured some into her mug. “Free refills,” he said.

She watched him add sugar and cream, in the same quantities that she’d used for her first cup. He was a detective; his job was to notice details. But Alex thought that probably wasn’t what made him such a good cop. It was that he had the capacity to use force, like any other police officer-but instead, he’d trap you with kindness.

That, Alex knew, was always more deadly.

It wasn’t something he’d put on his résumé, but Jordan was especially gifted at cutting the rug to Wiggles songs. His personal favorite was “Hot Potato,” but the one that really got Sam jazzed up was “Fruit Salad.” While Selena was upstairs taking a hot bath, Jordan put on the DVD-she was opposed to bombarding Sam with media, and didn’t want him to be able to spell D-O-RO-T-H-Y, as in Dinosaur, before he could even write his own name. Selena always wanted Jordan to be doing something else with the baby, like memorizing Shakespeare or solving differential equations-but Jordan was a big believer in letting the television do its job in turning one’s brain into porridge…at least long enough to get one good, silly tango session out of it.

Babies were always just the right weight, so that when you finally put them down, you felt like something was missing. “Fruit salad…yummy yummy!” Jordan crooned, whirling around until Sam opened his mouth and let a peal of giggles ribbon out.

The doorbell rang, and Jordan sashayed himself and his tiny partner through the entryway to answer it. Harmonizing-sort of-with Jeff, Murray, Greg, and Anthony in the background, Jordan opened the door. “Let’s make some fruit salad today,” he sang, and then he saw who was standing on his porch. “Judge Cormier!”

“Sorry to interrupt.”

He already knew that she’d recused herself from the case-that happy announcement had been passed down this afternoon. “No, that’s fine. Come on…in.” Jordan glanced back at the trail of toys that he and Sam had left in their wake (he had to clean those up before Selena came back downstairs, too). Kicking as many as he could behind the couch, he led the judge into his living room and switched off the DVD.

“This must be your son.”

“Yeah.” Jordan looked down at the baby, who was in the process of deciding whether or not to throw a fit now that the music had been turned off. “Sam.”

She reached out, letting Sam curl his hand around her forefinger. Sam could charm the pants off Hitler, probably, but seeing him only seemed to make Judge Cormier more agitated. “Why did you put my daughter on your witness list?”

Ah.

“Because,” Jordan said, “Josie and Peter used to be friends, and I may need her as a character witness.”

“They were friends ten years ago. Be honest. You did this to get me off the case.”

Jordan hefted Sam higher on his hip. “Your Honor, with all due respect, I’m not going to allow anyone to try this case for me. Especially not a judge who isn’t even involved in it anymore.”

He watched something flare behind her eyes. “Of course not,” she said tightly, and then she turned on her heel and walked out.

Ask a random kid today if she wants to be popular and she’ll tell you no, even if the truth is that if she was in a desert dying of thirst and had the choice between a glass of water and instant popularity, she’d probably choose the latter.

As soon as she heard the knock, Josie took her notebook and shoved it between the mattress and the box spring, which had to be the world’s lamest hiding spot.

Her mother stepped inside the bedroom, and for a second, Josie couldn’t put her finger on what wasn’t quite right. Then she figured it out: it wasn’t dark out yet. Usually by the time her mother got home from court, it was dinnertime-but now it was only 3:45; Josie had barely gotten home from school.

“I have to talk to you,” her mother said, sitting down beside her on the comforter. “I took myself off the case today.”

Josie stared at her. In her whole life, she’d never known her mother to back down from any legal challenge; plus, hadn’t they just had a conversation about the fact that she wasn’t recusing herself?

She felt that sick sinking that came when the teacher called on her and she hadn’t been paying attention. What had her mother found out that she hadn’t known days ago?

“What happened?” Josie asked, and she hoped her mother wasn’t paying attention enough to hear the way her voice was jumping all over the place.

“Well, that’s the other thing I need to talk to you about,” her mother said. “The defense put you on their witness list. They may ask you to go to court.”

“What?” Josie cried, and for just one moment, everything stopped: her breath, her heart, her courage. “I can’t go to court, Mom,” she said. “Don’t make me. Please…”

Her mother reached out for her, which was a good thing, because Josie was certain that at any second, she was going to simply vanish. Sublimation, she thought, the act of going from solid to vapor. And then she realized that this term was one she’d studied for the science test she’d never had because of everything else that had happened.

“I’ve been talking to the detective, and I know you don’t remember anything. The only reason you’re even on that list is because you used to be friends with Peter a long, long time ago.”

Josie drew back. “Do you swear that I won’t have to go to court?”

Her mother hesitated. “Honey, I can’t-”

“You have to!”

“What if we go talk to the defense attorney?” her mother said.

“What good would that do?”

“Well, if he sees how upset this is making you, he might think twice about using you as a witness at all.”

Josie lay down on her bed. For a few moments, her mother stroked her hair. Josie thought she heard her whisper I’m sorry, and then she got up and closed the door behind her.

“Matt,” Josie whispered, as if he could hear her; as if he could answer.

Matt. She drew in his name like oxygen and imagined it breaking into a thousand tiny pieces, funneling into her red blood cells, beating through her heart.

Peter snapped a pencil in half and stuck the eraser end into his corn bread. “Happy birthday to me,” he sang under his breath. He didn’t finish the song; what was the point when you already knew where it was heading?

“Hey, Houghton,” a correctional officer said, “we got a present for you.”

Standing behind him was a kid not much older than Peter. He was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet and he had snot running down his nose. The officer led him into the cell. “Make sure you share your cake,” the officer said.

Peter sat down on the lower bunk, just to let this kid know exactly who was in charge. The boy stood with his arms crossed tight around the blanket he’d been given, staring down at the ground. He reached up and pushed his glasses up his nose, and that’s when Peter realized there was something, well, wrong with him. He had that glassy-eyed, gum-lipped look of a special-needs kid.

Peter realized why they’d stuck the kid in his cell instead of anyone else’s: they figured Peter would be least likely to fuck with him.

He felt his hands ball into fists. “Hey, you,” Peter said.

The boy swiveled his head toward Peter. “I have a dog,” he said. “Do you have a dog?”

Peter pictured the correctional officers watching this comedy through their little video hookups, expecting Peter to put up with this shit.

Expecting something of him, period.

He reached forward and plucked the glasses off the kid’s nose. They were Coke-bottle-thick, with black plastic frames. The boy started to shriek, grabbing at his own face. His scream sounded like an air horn.

Peter put the glasses down on the floor and stomped on them, but in his rubber flip-flops that didn’t do much damage. So he picked them up and smashed them into the bars of the cell until the glass shattered.

By then the officers had arrived to pull Peter away from the kid, not that he was touching him anyway. They handcuffed him as the other inmates cheered him on. He was dragged down the hall to the superintendent’s office.

He sat hunched in a chair, with a guard watching him breathe, until the superintendent came in. “What was that all about, Peter?”

“It’s my birthday,” Peter said. “I just wanted to be alone for it.”

The funny thing, he realized, was that before the shooting, he’d believed that the best thing in the world was being left alone, so nobody could tell him he didn’t fit in. But as it turned out-not that he was about to tell the superintendent this-he didn’t much like himself, either.

The superintendent started to talk about disciplinary action; how this could affect him in the event of a conviction, what few privileges were left to be taken away. Peter deliberately tuned him out.

He thought instead of how angry the rest of the pod would be when this incident cost them television for a week.

He thought of Jordan’s bullied victim syndrome and wondered if he believed it; if anyone would.

He thought of how nobody who saw him in jail-not his mother, not his lawyer-ever said what they should: that Peter would be imprisoned forever, that he’d die in a cell that looked just like this one.

He thought of how he would rather end his life with a bullet.

He thought of how at night, you could hear the wings of bats beating in the cement corners of the jail, and screams. No one was stupid enough to cry.

At 9:00 a.m. on Saturday, when Jordan opened the door, he was still wearing pajama bottoms. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said.

Judge Cormier pasted on a smile. “I’m really sorry we got off on the wrong foot,” she said. “But you know how it is when it’s your child who’s in trouble…you just can’t think straight.” She stood arm in arm with the mini-me standing beside her. Josie Cormier, Jordan thought, scrutinizing the girl who was shaking like an aspen leaf. She had chestnut hair that hit her shoulders, and blue eyes that wouldn’t meet his.

“Josie is really scared,” the judge said. “I wondered if we could sit down for a minute…maybe you could put her at ease about being a witness. Hear whether or not what she knows will even help your case.”

“Jordan? Who is it?”

He turned around to find Selena standing in the entryway, holding on to Sam. She was wearing flannel pajamas, which might or might not have been one step more formal.

“Judge Cormier was wondering if we could talk to Josie about her testimony,” he said pointedly, trying desperately to telegraph to Selena that he was in deep trouble-since they all knew, with the exception perhaps of Josie, that the only reason he’d noticed up his intent to use her was to get Cormier off the case.

Jordan turned toward the judge again. “You see, I’m not really at that stage of planning yet.”

“Surely you have some idea of what you’re after if you call her as a witness…or you wouldn’t have put her on the list,” Alex pointed out.

“Why don’t you ring my secretary, and make an appointment-”

“I was thinking of now,” Judge Cormier said. “Please. I’m not here as a judge. Just as a mother.”

Selena stepped forward. “You come right on in,” she said, using her free arm to circle Josie’s shoulders. “You must be Josie, right? This here’s Sam.”

Josie smiled shyly at the baby. “Hi, Sam.”

“Baby, why don’t you get the judge some coffee or juice?”

Jordan stared at his wife, wondering what the hell she was up to now. “Right. Why don’t you come on in?”

Thankfully, the house looked nothing like it had the first time Cormier had showed up unannounced: there were no dishes in the sink; no papers cluttered the tables; toys were mysteriously missing. What could Jordan say-his wife was a neat freak. He pulled out one of the chairs at the kitchen table and offered it to Josie, then did the same for the judge. “How do you take your coffee?” he asked.

“Oh, we’re fine,” she said. She reached under the table for her daughter’s hand.

“Sam and I, we’re just going into the living room to play,” Selena said.

“Why don’t you stay?” He gave her a measured glance, one that begged her not to leave him alone to be eviscerated.

“You don’t need us distracting you,” Selena said, and she took the baby away.

Jordan sat down heavily across from the Cormiers. He was good at thinking on his feet; surely he could suffer through this. “Well,” he said, “it really isn’t anything to be scared of at all. I was just going to ask you some basic questions about your friendship with Peter.”

“We’re not friends,” Josie said.

“Yes, I know that. But you used to be. I’m interested in the first time you met him.”

Josie glanced at Alex. “Around nursery school, or maybe before.”

“Okay. Did you play at your house? His?”

“Both.”

“Did you have other friends who used to hang out with you?”

“Not really,” Josie said.

Alex listened, but she couldn’t help tuning a lawyer’s ear to McAfee’s questions. He’s got nothing, she thought. This is nothing.

“When did you two stop hanging around?”

“Sixth grade,” Josie answered. “We just kind of started liking different things.”

“Did you have any contact with Peter after that?”

Josie shifted in her chair. “Only in the halls and stuff.”

“You worked with him, too, right?”

Josie looked at her mother again. “Not for very long.”

Both mother and daughter stared at him, anticipatory-which was awfully funny, because Jordan was making this all up as he went. “What about the relationship between Matt and Peter?”

“They didn’t have one,” Josie said, but her cheeks went pink.

“Did Matt do anything to Peter that might have been upsetting?”

“Maybe.”

“Can you be more specific?”

She shook her head, her lips pressed tightly together.

“When was the last time you saw Matt and Peter together?”

“I don’t remember,” Josie whispered.

“Did they fight?”

Tears clouded her eyes. “I don’t know.” She turned to her mother and then slowly sank her head down to the table, her face pressed into the curve of her own arm.

“Honey, why don’t you go wait in the other room?” the judge said evenly.

They both watched Josie sit down on a chair in the living room, wiping her eyes, hunching forward to watch the baby playing on the floor.

“Look,” Judge Cormier sighed. “I’m off the case. I know that’s why you put her on the witness list, even if you’d never actually intended to call her. But I’m not questioning that right now. I’m talking to you parent to parent. If I give you an affidavit signed by Josie saying she doesn’t remember anything, would you think twice about putting her on the stand?”

Jordan glanced into the living room. Selena had coaxed Josie onto the floor with her. She was pushing a toy plane toward Sam’s feet. When he burst out with the sheer belly laugh that only a baby has, Josie smiled the tiniest bit, too. Selena caught his gaze, raised her brows in a question.

He’d gotten what he wanted: Cormier’s recusal. He could be generous enough to do this for her.

“All right,” he told the judge. “Get me the affidavit.”

“When they say to scald the milk,” Josie said, scrubbing another Brillo pad against the blackened bottom of the pot, “I don’t think they mean like this.”

Her mother picked up a dish towel. “Well, how was I supposed to know?”

“Maybe we should start with something easier than pudding,” Josie suggested.

“Like?”

She smiled. “Toast?”

Now that her mother was home during the day, she was restless. To that end, she’d taken up cooking-which was a good idea only if you happened to work for the fire department and needed job security. Even when her mother followed the recipe, it didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to, and then inevitably Josie would press her for details and find out she’d used baking powder instead of baking soda, or whole wheat flour instead of cornmeal (We didn’t have any, she complained).

At first, Josie had suggested nightly culinary classes out of self-preservation-she really didn’t know what to say when her mother plunked a charred brick of meatloaf down with the same dramatic reverence that might have been given to the Holy Grail. As it turned out, though, it was sort of fun. When her mother wasn’t acting like she knew it all (because she so totally didn’t, when it came to cooking), she actually was pretty amusing to hang out with. It was cool, too, for Josie to feel as if she had control over a situation-any situation, even if it happened to be making chocolate pudding, or scrubbing its final remains from the bottom of a saucepan.

Tonight, they’d made pizza-which Josie had counted as a success, until her mother had tried to slide the pizza out of the oven and it had folded, halfway, on the coils inside, which meant they had to make grilled cheese as a default dinner. They had salad out of a bag-something her mother couldn’t screw up, Josie figured, even if she worked hard at it. But now, thanks to the pudding disaster, there wasn’t any dessert.

“How did you get to be Julia Child, anyway?” her mother asked.

“Julia Child’s dead.”

“Nigella Lawson, then.”

Josie shrugged and turned off the water; stripped off the yellow plastic gloves. “I kind of got sick of soup,” she said.

“Didn’t I tell you not to turn on the oven when I wasn’t home?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t listen to you.”

Once, when Josie was in fifth grade, the students had had to build a bridge out of popsicle sticks. The idea was to craft a design that could withstand the most pressure. She could remember riding in the car across the Connecticut River, and studying the arches and struts and supports of the real bridges, trying her best to copy them. At the end of the unit, two engineers from the Army Corps came in with a machine specially designed to put weight and torque on each bridge, to see which child’s was the strongest.

The parents were invited in for the testing. Josie’s mother had been in court, the only mother not present that day. Or so she’d remembered until now, when Josie realized that her mother had been there, for the last ten minutes. She might have missed Josie’s bridge test-during which the sticks splintered and groaned, and then burst apart in catastrophic failure-but she’d been there in time to help Josie pick up the pieces.

The pot was sparkling, silver. The milk carton was half full. “We could start over,” Josie suggested.

When there was no answer, Josie turned around. “I’d like that,” her mother answered quietly, but by that time, neither one of them was talking about cooking.

There was a knock at the door, and that connection between them-evanescent as a butterfly that lands on your hand-broke. “Are you expecting someone?” Josie’s mother asked.

She wasn’t, but she went to answer it anyway. When Josie opened the door, she found the detective who’d interviewed her standing there.

Didn’t detectives show up at your door only when you were in serious trouble?

Breathe, Josie, she told herself, and she noticed he was holding a bottle of wine just as her mother came out to see what was going on.

“Oh,” her mother said. “Patrick.”

Patrick?

Josie turned and realized her mother was blushing.

He held out the bottle of wine. “Since this seems to be a bone of contention between us…”

“You know what?” Josie said, uncomfortable. “I’m just, um, going to go study.” She’d leave it to her mother to figure out how she was going to do that, since she’d finished her homework before dinner.

She flew up the stairs, pounding extra hard with her feet so that she wouldn’t hear what her mother was saying. In her room, she turned the music on her CD player up to its loudest level, threw herself onto her bed, and stared up at the ceiling.

Josie had a midnight curfew, not that she was using it at all now. But before, the bargain went like this: Matt would get Josie home by midnight; in return, Josie’s mother would disappear like smoke the moment they entered the house, retreating upstairs so that she and Matt could fool around in the living room. She had no idea what her mother’s rationale for this was-unless it was that it was safer for Josie to be doing this in her own living room than in a car or under the bleachers. She could remember how they’d come together in the dark, their bodies fusing and their silence measured. Realizing that at any moment her mom might come down for a drink of water or an aspirin only made it that much more exciting.

At three or four in the morning, when her eyes were blurry and her chin rubbed raw by beard stubble, Josie would kiss Matt good night at the front door. She’d watch his taillights disappear like the glow of a dying cigarette. She’d tiptoe upstairs, past her mother’s bedroom, thinking: You don’t know me at all.

“If I won’t let you buy me a drink,” Alex said, “then what makes you think I’d take a bottle of wine from you?”

Patrick grinned. “I’m not giving it to you. I’m going to open it, and you might just choose to borrow some.”

As he said this, he was walking into the house, as if he already knew the way. He stepped into the kitchen, sniffed twice-it still smelled of the ashes of pizza crust and incinerated milk-and began to randomly open and close drawers until he found a corkscrew.

Alex folded her arms, not because she was cold, but because she could not remember feeling this light inside, as if her body housed a second solar system. She watched Patrick remove two wineglasses from a cabinet and pour.

“To being a civilian,” he said, toasting.

The wine was rich and full; like velvet; like autumn. Alex closed her eyes. She would have liked to hold on to this moment, drag it wider and fuller, until it covered up so many others that had come before.

“So, how is it?” Patrick asked. “Being unemployed?”

She thought for a moment. “I made a grilled cheese sandwich today without burning the pan.”

“I hope you framed it.”

“Nah, I left that to the prosecution.” She smiled at her own little inside joke, and then felt it dissolve on the tails of her thoughts as she imagined Diana Leven’s face. “Do you ever feel guilty?” Alex asked.

“Why?”

“Because for a half a second, you’ve almost forgotten everything that happened.”

Patrick put down his wineglass. “Sometimes, when I’m going through the evidence and I see a fingerprint or a photo or a shoe that belonged to one of the kids who died, I take a little more time to look at it. It’s crazy, but it seems like someone ought to, so that they’re remembered an extra minute or two.” He looked up at her. “When someone dies, their lives aren’t the ones that stop at that moment, you know?”

Alex lifted her glass of wine and drained it. “Tell me how you found her.”

“Who?”

“Josie. That day.”

Patrick met her gaze, and Alex knew he was weighing her right to know what her daughter had experienced against his wish to save her from a truth that would cut her to the quick. “She was in the locker room,” he began quietly. “And I thought…I thought she was dead, too, because she was covered in blood, facedown next to Matt Royston. But then she moved and-” His voice broke. “It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”

“You know you’re a hero, don’t you?”

Patrick shook his head. “I’m a coward. The only reason I ran into that building was because if I didn’t, I’d have nightmares for the rest of my life.”

Alex shivered. “I have nightmares, and I wasn’t even there.”

He took away her wineglass and studied her palm, as if he were going to read her the line of her life. “Maybe you should try not sleeping,” Patrick said.

His skin smelled of evergreen and spearmint, this close. Alex could feel her heart pounding through the tips of her fingers. She imagined he could feel it, too.

She didn’t know what was going to happen next-what was supposed to happen next-but it would be random, unpredictable, uncomfortable. She was getting ready to push away from him when Patrick’s hands anchored her in place. “Stop being such a judge, Alex,” he whispered, and he kissed her.

When feeling came back, in a storm of color and force and sensation, the most you could do was hold on to the person beside you and hope you could weather it. Alex closed her eyes and expected the worst-but it wasn’t a bad thing; it was just a different thing. A messier one, a more complicated one. She hesitated, and then she kissed Patrick back, willing to concede that you might have to lose control before you could find what you’d been missing.

The Month Before

W hen you love someone, there’s a pattern to the way you come together. You might not even realize it, but your bodies are choreographed: a touch on the hip, a stroke of the hair. A staccato kiss, break away, a longer one, his hand slipping under your shirt. It’s a routine, but not in the boring sense of the word. It’s just the way you’ve learned to fit, and it’s why, when you’ve been with one guy for a long time, your teeth do not scrape together when you kiss; you do not bump noses or elbows.

Matt and Josie had a pattern. When they started making out, he’d lean in and look at her as if he couldn’t possibly see any other part of the world. It was hypnotism, she realized, because after a while she sort of felt that way, too. Then he’d kiss her, so slowly that there was hardly pressure on her mouth, until she was the one pushing against him for more. He worked his way down her body, from mouth to neck, from neck to breasts, and then his fingers would do a search-and-rescue mission below the waistband of her jeans. The whole thing lasted about ten minutes, and then Matt would roll off her and take the condom out of his wallet so they could have sex.

Not that Josie minded any of it. If she was going to be honest, she liked the pattern. It felt like a roller coaster-going up that hill, knowing what was coming next on track and knowing, too, that she couldn’t do anything to stop it.

They were in her living room, in the dark, with the television on for background noise. Matt had already peeled off her clothes, and now he was leaning over her like a tidal wave, pulling down his boxers. He sprang free and settled between Josie’s legs.

“Hey,” she said, as he tried to push into her. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“Aw, Jo. Just once, I don’t want there to be anything between us.”

His words could melt her just as surely as his kiss or his touch; she already knew that by now. She hated that rubbery smell that permeated the air the moment he ripped open the Trojan packet and stayed on his hands until they were finished. And God, did anything feel better than having Matt inside her? Josie shifted just a little, felt her body adjust to him, and her legs trembled.

When Josie had gotten her period at thirteen, her mother had not given her the typical heart-to-heart mother/daughter chat. Instead, she handed Josie a book on probability and statistics. “Every time you have sex, you can get pregnant or you can not get pregnant,” her mother said. “That’s fifty-fifty. So don’t fool yourself into thinking that if you only do it once without protection, the odds are in your favor.”

Josie pushed at Matt. “I don’t think we should do this,” she whispered.

“Have sex?”

“Have sex without…you know. Anything.”

He was disappointed, Josie could tell by the way his face froze for just a moment. But he pulled out and fished for his wallet, found a condom. Josie took it out of his hand, tore open the package, helped him put it on. “One day,” she began, and then he kissed her, and Josie forgot what she was going to say.

Lacy had started spreading corn on the lawn back in November to help the deer through the winter. There were plenty of locals who frowned upon artificially giving the deer a helping hand during the winter-mostly the same people whose gardens were wrecked by those surviving deer in the summer-but for Lacy, there was karma involved. As long as Lewis insisted on hunting, she was going to do what little she could to cancel out his actions.

She put on her heavy boots-there was still enough snow on the ground to merit it, although it had gotten warm enough for the sap to start flowing, which meant that at least in theory, spring was coming. As soon as Lacy walked outside, she could smell the maple syrup refining in the neighbor’s sugar house, like candy crystals in the air. She carried the bucket of feed corn to the swing set in the backyard-a wooden structure that the boys had played on when they were small, and that Lewis had never quite gotten around to dismantling.

“Hey, Mom.”

Lacy turned to find Peter standing nearby, his hands dug deep into the pockets of his jeans. He was wearing a T-shirt and a down vest, and she imagined he had to be freezing. “Hi, sweetie,” she said. “What’s going on?”

She could probably count on one hand the number of times Peter had come out of his room lately, much less outside. It was part of puberty, she knew, for adolescents to hole up in burrows and do whatever it was they did behind closed doors. In Peter’s case, it involved the computer. He was online constantly-not for web surfing as much as programming, and how could she fault that kind of passion?

“Nothing. What are you doing?”

“Same thing I’ve done all winter.”

“Really?”

She looked up at him. Against the beauty of the brisk outdoors, Peter seemed wildly out of place. His features were too delicate to match the craggy line of mountains in the backdrop behind him; his skin seemed nearly as white as the snow. He didn’t fit, and Lacy realized that most of the time when she saw Peter somewhere, she could make the same observation.

“Here,” Lacy said, handing him the bucket. “Help.”

Peter took the bucket and began to toss handfuls of corn on the ground. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Is it true that you were the one who asked out Dad?”

Lacy grinned. “Well, if I hadn’t, I would have probably had to wait around forever. Your father is many things, but perceptive isn’t one of them.”

She had met Lewis at a pro-choice rally. Although Lacy would be the first to tell you that there was no greater gift than having a baby, she was a realist-she’d sent home enough mothers who were too young or too poor or too overburdened to know that the odds of that child having a good life were slim. She had gone with a friend to a march at the statehouse in Concord and stood on the steps with a sisterhood of women who held up signs: I’M PRO-CHOICE AND I VOTE…AGAINST ABORTION? DON’T HAVE ONE. She had looked around the crowd that day and realized that there was one lone man-well-dressed in a suit and tie, right in the thick of the protesters. Lacy had been fascinated by him-as a protester, he was completely cast against type. Wow, Lacy had said, working her way toward him. What a day.

Tell me about it.

Have you ever been here before? Lacy had asked.

My first time, Lewis said.

Mine, too.

They had gotten separated as a new influx of marchers came up the stone steps. A paper had blown off the stack that Lewis was carrying, but by the time Lacy could grab it, he’d been swallowed by the crowd. It was the cover page to something bigger; she knew by the staple holes at the top, and it had a title that nearly put her to sleep: “The allocation of public education resources in New Hampshire: a critical analysis.” But there was also an author’s name: Lewis Houghton, Sterling College Dept. of Economics.

When she called to tell Lewis that she had his paper, he said that he didn’t need it. He could print out another copy. Yes, Lacy had said, but I have to bring this one back to you.

Why?

So you can explain it to me over dinner.

It wasn’t until they’d gone out for sushi that Lacy learned the reason Lewis had been at the statehouse had nothing to do with attending a pro-choice rally, but only because he had a scheduled appointment with the governor.

“But how did you tell him?” Peter asked. “That you liked him, you know, like that?”

“As I recall, I grabbed him after our third date and kissed him. Then again, that may have been to shut him up because he was going on and on about free trade.” She glanced back over her shoulder, and suddenly the questions all made sense. “Peter,” she said, a smile breaking over her. “Is there someone you like?”

Peter didn’t even have to answer-his face turned crimson.

“Do I get to know her name?”

“No,” Peter said emphatically.

“Well, it doesn’t matter.” She looped her arm through Peter’s. “Gosh, I envy you. There’s nothing that compares to those first few months when all you can think of is each other. I mean, love in any form is pretty fabulous…but falling in love…well.”

“It’s not like that,” Peter said. “I mean, it’s kind of one-sided.”

“I bet she’s just as nervous as you are.”

He grimaced. “Mom. She barely even registers my existence. I’m not…I don’t hang out with the kind of people she hangs out with.”

Lacy looked at her son. “Well,” she said. “Then your first order of business is to change that.”

“How?”

“Find ways to connect with her. Maybe in places where you know her friends won’t be around. And try to show her the side of you that she doesn’t normally see.”

“Like what?”

“The inside.” Lacy tapped Peter’s chest. “If you tell her how you feel, I think you might be surprised at the reaction.”

Peter ducked his head and kicked at a hummock of snow. Then he glanced up at her shyly. “Really?”

Lacy nodded. “It worked for me.”

“Okay,” Peter said. “Thanks.”

She watched him trudge back up the hill to the house, and then she turned her attention back to the deer. Lacy would have to feed them until the snow melted. Once you started taking care of them, you had to follow through, or they just wouldn’t make it.