an you state your name for the record?” Jordan asked.

“Lacy Houghton.”

“Where do you live?”

“1616 Goldenrod Lane, Sterling, New Hampshire.”

“Who lives with you?”

“My husband, Lewis,” Lacy said. “And my son, Peter.”

“Do you have any other children, Ms. Houghton?”

“I had a son, Joseph, but he was killed by a drunk driver last year.”

“Can you tell us,” Jordan McAfee said, “when you first became aware that something had happened at Sterling High School on March sixth?”

“I was on call overnight at the hospital. I’m a midwife. After I had finished delivering a baby that morning. I went out to the nurses’ station, and they were all gathered around the radio. There had been an explosion at the high school.”

“What did you do when you heard?”

“I told someone to cover for me, and I drove to the school. I needed to make sure that Peter was all right.”

“How did Peter usually get to school?”

“He drove,” Lacy said. “He has a car.”

“Ms. Houghton, tell me about your relationship with Peter.”

Lacy smiled. “He’s my baby. I had two sons, but Peter was the one who was always quieter, more sensitive. He always needed a little more encouragement.”

“Were you two close when he was growing up?”

“Absolutely.”

“How was Peter’s relationship with his brother?”

“It was fine…”

“And his father?”

Lacy hesitated. She could feel Lewis in the room as surely as if he were beside her, and she thought about him walking in the rain through the cemetery. “I think that Lewis had a tighter bond with Joey, while Peter and I have more in common.”

“Did Peter ever tell you about the problems he had with other kids?”

“Yes.”

“Objection,” the prosecutor said. “Hearsay.”

“I’m going to overrule it for now,” the judge answered. “But be careful where you’re going, Mr. McAfee.”

Jordan turned to her again. “Why do you think Peter had problems with those kids?”

“He’d get picked on because he wasn’t like them. He wasn’t very athletic. He didn’t like to play cops and robbers. He was artistic and creative and thoughtful, and kids made fun of him for that.”

“What did you do?”

“I tried,” Lacy admitted, “to toughen him up.” As she spoke she directed her words at Peter, and hoped he could read it as an apology. “What does any mother do when she sees her child being teased by someone else? I told Peter I loved him; that kids like that didn’t know anything. I told him that he was amazing and compassionate and kind and smart, all the things we want adults to be. I knew that all the attributes he was teased for, at age five, were going to work in his favor by the time he was thirty-five…but I couldn’t get him there overnight. You can’t fast-forward your child’s life, no matter how much you want to.”

“When did Peter start high school, Ms. Houghton?”

“In the fall of 2004.”

“Was Peter still being picked on there?”

“Worse than ever,” Lacy said. “I even asked his brother to keep an eye out for him.”

Jordan walked toward her. “Tell me about Joey.”

“Everybody liked Joey. He was smart, an excellent athlete. He could relate just as easily to adults as he could to kids his own age. He…well, he cut a swath through that school.”

“You must have been very proud of him.”

“I was. But I think that because of Joey, teachers and students had a certain sort of idea in mind for a Houghton boy, before Peter even arrived. And when he did get there, and people realized he wasn’t like Joey, it only made things worse for him.” She watched Peter’s face transform as she spoke, like the change of a season. Why hadn’t she taken the time before, when she had it, to tell Peter that she understood? That she knew Joey had cast such a wide shadow, it was hard to find the sunlight?

“How old was Peter when Joey died?”

“It was at the end of his sophomore year.”

“That must have been devastating for the family,” Jordan said.

“It was.”

“What did you do to help Peter deal with his grief?”

Lacy glanced down at her lap. “I wasn’t in any shape to help Peter. I had a very hard time helping myself.”

“What about your husband? Was he a resource for Peter then?”

“I think we were both just trying to make it through one day at a time…. If anything, Peter was the one who was holding the family together.”

“Mrs. Houghton, did Peter ever say that he wanted to hurt people at school?”

Lacy’s throat tightened. “No.”

“Was there ever anything in Peter’s personality that led you to believe he was capable of an act like this?”

“When you look into your baby’s eyes,” Lacy said softly, “you see everything you hope they can be…not everything you wish they won’t become.”

“Did you ever find any plans or notes to indicate that Peter was plotting this event?”

A tear coursed down her cheek. “No.”

Jordan softened his voice. “Did you look, Mrs. Houghton?”

She thought back to the moment she’d cleared out Joey’s desk; how she’d stood over the toilet and flushed the drugs she’d found hidden in his drawer. “No,” Lacy confessed. “I didn’t. I thought I was helping him. After Joey died, all I wanted to do was keep Peter close. I didn’t want to invade his privacy; I didn’t want to fight with him; I didn’t want anyone else to ever hurt him. I just wanted him to be a child forever.” She glanced up, crying harder now. “But you can’t do that, if you’re a parent. Because part of your job is letting them grow up.”

There was a clatter in the gallery as a man in the back stood up, nearly upending a television camera. Lacy had never seen him before. He had thinning black hair and a mustache; his eyes were on fire. “Guess what,” he spat out. “My daughter Maddie is never going to grow up.” He pointed at a woman beside him, and then further forward on a bench. “Neither is her daughter. Or his son. You goddamned bitch. If you’d done your job better, I could still be doing my job.”

The judge began to smack his gavel. “Sir,” he said. “Sir, I have to ask you to-”

“Your son’s a monster. He’s a fucking monster,” the man yelled, as two bailiffs reached his seat and grabbed him by the upper arms, dragging him out of the courtroom.

Once, Lacy had been present at the birth of an infant that was missing half its heart. The family had known that their child would not live; they chose to carry through with the pregnancy, in the hope that they could have a few brief moments on this earth with her before she was gone for good. Lacy had stood in a corner of the room as the parents held their daughter. She didn’t study their faces; she just couldn’t. Instead, she focused on the medical needs of that newborn. She watched it, still and frost-blue, move one tiny fist in slow motion, like an astronaut navigating space. Then, one by one, her fingers unfurled and she let go.

Lacy thought of those miniature fingers, of slipping away. She turned to Peter. I’m so sorry, she mouthed silently. Then she covered her face with her hands and sobbed.

Once the judge had called for a recess and the jury had filed out, Jordan moved toward the bench. “Judge, the defense asks to be heard,” he said. “We’d like to move for a mistrial.”

Even with his back to her, he could feel Diana rolling her eyes. “How convenient.”

“Well, Mr. McAfee,” the judge said, “on what grounds?”

The grounds that I’ve got absolutely nothing better to salvage my case, Jordan thought. “Your Honor, there’s been an incredibly emotional outburst from the father of a victim in front of the jury. There’s no way that kind of speech can be ignored, and there’s no instruction you can give them that will unring that bell.”

“Is that all, Counselor?”

“No,” Jordan said. “Prior to this, the jury may not have known that family members of the victims were sitting in the gallery. Now they do-and they also know that every move they make is being watched by those same people. That’s a tremendous amount of pressure to put on a jury in a case that’s already extremely emotional and highly publicized. How are they supposed to put aside the expectations of these family members and do their jobs fairly and impartially?”

“Are you kidding?” Diana said. “Who did the jury think was in the gallery? Vagrants? Of course it’s full of people who were affected by the shootings. That’s why they’re here.”

Judge Wagner glanced up. “Mr. McAfee, I’m not declaring a mistrial. I understand your concern, but I think I can address it with an instruction to the jurors to disregard any sort of emotional outburst from the gallery. Everyone involved in this case understands that emotions are running high, and that people may not always be able to control themselves. However, I’ll also issue a cautionary instruction to the gallery to restrain themselves, or I will close the courtroom to observers.”

Jordan sucked in his breath. “Please do note my exception, Your Honor.”

“Of course, Mr. McAfee,” he said. “See you in fifteen minutes.”

As the judge exited for chambers, Jordan headed back to the defense table, trying to divine some sort of magic that would save Peter. The truth was, no matter what King Wah had said, no matter how clear the explanation of PTSD, no matter if the jury completely empathized with Peter-Jordan had forgotten one salient point: they would always feel sorrier for the victims.

Diana smiled at him on her way out of the courtroom. “Nice try,” she said.

Selena’s favorite room in the courthouse was tucked near the janitor’s closet and filled with old maps. She had no idea what they were doing in a courthouse instead of a library, but she liked to hide up there sometimes when she got tired of watching Jordan strut around in front of the bench. She’d come here a few times during the trial to nurse Sam on the days they didn’t have a sitter to watch him.

Now she led Lacy into her haven and sat her down in front of a world map that had the southern hemisphere as its center. Australia was purple, New Zealand green. It was Selena’s favorite. She liked the red dragons painted into the seas, and the fierce storm clouds in the corners. She liked the calligraphed compass, drawn for direction. She liked thinking that the world might look completely different from another angle.

Lacy Houghton had not stopped crying, and Selena knew she had to-or the cross-examination was going to be a disaster. She sat down beside Lacy. “Can I get you something? Soup? Coffee?”

Lacy shook her head and wiped her nose with a tissue. “I can’t do anything to save him.”

“That’s Jordan’s job,” Selena said, although to be frank, she couldn’t imagine a scenario for Peter that did not involve serious jail time. She racked her brain, trying to think of what else she could say or do to calm Lacy down, just as Sam reached up and yanked on one of her braids.

Bingo.

“Lacy,” Selena said. “Do you mind holding him while I look for something in my bag?”

Lacy lifted her gaze. “You…you don’t mind?”

Selena shook her head and transferred the baby to her lap. Sam stared up at Lacy, diligently trying to fit his fist in his mouth. “Gah,” he said.

A smile ghosted across Lacy’s face. “Little man,” she whispered, and she shifted the baby so that she could hold him more firmly.

“Excuse me?”

Selena turned to see the door crack open and Alex Cormier’s face peek inside. She immediately stood up. “Your Honor, you can’t come in-”

“Let her,” Lacy said.

Selena stepped back as the judge walked into the room and sat down beside Lacy. She put a Styrofoam cup on the table and reached out, smiling a little as Sam grabbed onto her pinky finger and tugged on it. “The coffee here is awful, but I brought you some anyway.”

“Thanks.”

Selena moved gingerly behind the stacks of maps until she was standing behind the two women, watching them with the same stunned curiosity she’d have shown if a lioness cozied up to an impala instead of eating it.

“You did well in there,” the judge said.

Lacy shook her head. “I didn’t do well enough.”

“She won’t ask you much on cross, if anything.”

Lacy lifted the baby to her chest and stroked his back. “I don’t think I can go back in there,” she said, her voice hitching.

“You can, and you will,” the judge said. “Because Peter needs you to.”

“They hate him. They hate me.”

Judge Cormier put her hand on Lacy’s shoulder. “Not everyone,” she said. “When we go back, I’m going to be sitting in the front row. You don’t have to look at the prosecutor. You just look at me.”

Selena’s jaw dropped. Often, with fragile witnesses or young children, they’d plant a person as a focal point to make testifying less scary. To make them feel that out of that whole crowd of people, they had at least one friend.

Sam found his thumb and started to suck on it, falling asleep against Lacy’s chest. Selena watched Alex reach out, stroke the dark marabou tufts of her son’s hair. “Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you’re young,” the judge said to Lacy. “But I don’t think we make any fewer when we’re grown up.”

As Jordan walked into the holding cell where Peter was being kept, he was already doing damage control. “It’s not going to hurt us,” he announced. “The judge is going to give the jury instructions to disregard that whole outburst.”

Peter sat on the metal bench, his head in his hands.

“Peter,” Jordan said. “Did you hear me? I know it looked bad, and I know it was upsetting, but legally, it isn’t going to affect your-”

“I need to tell her why I did it,” Peter interrupted.

“Your mother?” Jordan said. “You can’t. She’s still sequestered.” He hesitated. “Look, as soon as I can get you to talk to her, I-”

“No. I mean, I have to tell everyone.”

Jordan looked at his client. Peter was dry-eyed; his fists rested on the bench. When he lifted his gaze, it wasn’t the terrified face of the child he’d sat beside in court on the first day of the trial. It was someone who had grown up, overnight.

“We’re getting out your side of the story,” Jordan said. “You just have to be patient. I know this is hard to believe, but it’s going to come together. We’re doing the best we can.”

“We’re not,” Peter said. “You are.” He stood up, walking closer to Jordan. “You promised. You said it was our turn. But when you said that, you meant your turn, didn’t you? You never intended for me to get up there and tell everyone what really happened.”

“Did you see what they did to your mother?” Jordan argued. “Do you have any idea what’s going to happen to you if you get up there and sit in that witness box?”

In that instant, something in Peter broke: not his anger, and not his hidden fear, but that last spider-thread of hope. Jordan thought of the testimony Michael Beach had given, about how it looked when the life left a person’s face. You did not have to witness someone dying to see that.

“Jordan,” Peter said. “If I’m going to spend the rest of my life in jail, I want them to hear my side of the story.”

Jordan opened his mouth, intending to tell his client absolutely fucking not, he would not be taking the stand and ruining the tower of cards Jordan had created in the hope of an acquittal. But who was he kidding? Certainly not Peter.

He took a deep breath. “All right,” he said. “Tell me what you’re going to say.”

Diana Leven didn’t have any questions for Lacy Houghton, which-Jordan knew-was most likely a blessing. In addition to the fact that there wasn’t anything the prosecutor could ask her that hadn’t been covered better by Maddie Shaw’s father, he hadn’t known how much more stress Lacy could take without being rendered incomprehensible on the stand. As she was escorted from the courtroom, the judge looked up from his file. “Your next witness, Mr. McAfee?”

Jordan inhaled deeply. “The defense calls Peter Houghton.”

Behind him, there was a flurry of activity. Rustling, as reporters dug fresh pens out of their pockets and turned to a fresh page on their pads. Murmurs, as the families of the victims traced Peter’s steps to the witness stand. He could see Selena off to one side, her eyes wide at this unplanned development.

Peter sat down and stared only at Jordan, just as he’d told him to. Good boy, he thought. “Are you Peter Houghton?”

“Yes,” Peter said, but he wasn’t close enough to the microphone for it to carry. He leaned forward and repeated the word. “Yes,” he said, and this time, an unholy screech from the PA system rang through the courtroom speakers.

“What grade are you in, Peter?”

“I was a junior when I got arrested.”

“How old are you now?”

“Eighteen.”

Jordan walked toward the jury box. “Peter, are you the person who went to Sterling High School the morning of March 6, 2007, and shot and killed ten people?”

“Yes.”

“And wounded nineteen others?”

“Yes.”

“And caused damage to countless other people, and to a great deal of property?”

“I know,” Peter said.

“You’re not denying that today, are you?”

“No.”

“Can you tell the jury,” Jordan asked, “why you did it?”

Peter looked into his eyes. “They started it.”

“Who?”

“The bullies. The jocks. The ones who called me a freak my whole life.”

“Do you remember their names?”

“There are so many of them,” Peter said.

“Can you tell us why you felt you had to resort to violence?”

Jordan had told Peter that whatever he did, he could not get angry. That he had to stay calm and collected while he spoke, or his testimony would backfire on him-even more than Jordan already expected. “I tried to do what my mom wanted me to do,” Peter explained. “I tried to be like them, but that didn’t work out.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I tried out for soccer, but never got any time on the field. Once, I helped some kids play a practical joke on a teacher by moving his car from the parking lot into the gym…. I got detention, but the other kids didn’t, because they were on the basketball team and had a game on Saturday.”

“But, Peter,” Jordan said, “why this?”

Peter wet his lips. “It wasn’t supposed to end this way.”

“Did you plan to kill all those people?”

They had rehearsed this in the holding cell. All Peter had to say was what he’d said before, when Jordan had coached him. No. No I didn’t.

Peter looked down at his hands. “When I did it in the game,” he said quietly, “I won.”

Jordan froze. Peter had broken from the script, and now Jordan couldn’t find his line. He only knew that the curtain was going to close before he finished. Scrambling, he replayed Peter’s response in his mind: it wasn’t all bad. It made him sound depressed, like a loner.

You can salvage this, Jordan thought to himself.

He walked up to Peter, trying desperately to communicate that he needed focus here; he needed Peter to play along with him. He needed to show the jury that this boy had chosen to stand before them in order to show remorse. “Do you understand now that there weren’t any winners that day, Peter?”

Jordan saw something shine in Peter’s eyes. A tiny flame, one that had been rekindled-optimism. Jordan had done his job too well: after five months of telling Peter that he could get him acquitted, that he had a strategy, that he knew what he was doing…Peter, goddammit, had picked this moment to finally believe him.

“The game’s not over yet, right?” Peter said, and he smiled hopefully at Jordan.

As two of the jurors turned away, Jordan fought for composure. He walked back to the defense table, cursing under his breath. This had always been Peter’s downfall, hadn’t it? He had no idea what he looked like or sounded like to the ordinary observer, the person who didn’t know that Peter wasn’t actively trying to sound like a homicidal killer, but instead trying to share a private joke with one of his only friends.

“Mr. McAfee,” the judge said. “Do you have any further questions?”

He had a thousand: How could you do this to me? How could you do this to yourself? How can I make this jury understand that you didn’t mean that the way it sounded? He shook his head, puzzling through his course of action, and the judge took that for an answer.

“Ms. Leven?” he said.

Jordan’s head snapped up. Wait, he wanted to say. Wait, I was still thinking. He held his breath. If Diana asked Peter anything-even what his middle name was-then he’d have a chance to redirect. And surely, then, he could leave the jury with a different impression of Peter.

Diana riffled through the notes she’d been taking, and then she turned them facedown on the table. “The state has no questions, Your Honor,” she said.

Judge Wagner summoned a bailiff. “Take Mr. Houghton back to his seat. We’ll adjourn court for the weekend.”

As soon as the jury was dismissed, the courtroom erupted in a roar of questions. Reporters swam up the stream of onlookers toward the bar, hoping to corral Jordan for a quote. He grabbed his briefcase and hurried out the back door, the one through which the bailiffs were taking Peter.

“Hold it,” he called out. He jogged closer to the men, who stood with Peter between them, his hands cuffed. “I have to talk to my client about Monday.”

The bailiffs looked at each other, and then at Jordan. “Two minutes,” they said, but they didn’t step away. If Jordan wanted to talk to Peter, this was the only circumstance in which he was going to do it.

Peter’s face was flushed, beaming. “Did I do a good job?”

Jordan hesitated, fishing for a string of words. “Did you say what you wanted to say?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you did a really good job,” Jordan said.

He stood in the hallway and watched the bailiffs lead Peter away. Just before he turned the corner, Peter lifted his conjoined hands, a wave. Jordan nodded, his hands in his pockets.

He slipped out of the jail through a rear door and walked past three media vans with satellite dishes perched on the top like enormous white birds. Through the back window of each van, Jordan could see the producers editing video for the evening news. His face was on every television monitor.

He passed the last van and heard, through the open window, Peter’s voice. The game’s not over yet.

Jordan hiked his briefcase over his shoulder and walked a little faster. “Oh, yes it is,” he said.

Selena had made her husband what he referred to as the Executioner’s Meal, the same thing she served him each night before a closing argument: roast goose, as in, Your goose is cooked. With Sam already in bed, she slipped a plate in front of Jordan and then sat down across from him. “I don’t even really know what to say,” she admitted.

Jordan pushed the food away. “I’m not ready for this yet.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can’t end the case with that.”

“Baby,” Selena pointed out, “after today, you couldn’t save this case with an entire squad of firefighters.”

“I can’t just give up. I told Peter he had a chance.” He turned his anguished face up to Selena’s. “I was the one who let him get up on the stand, even though I knew better. There’s got to be something I can do…something I can say so that Peter’s testimony isn’t the last one the jury’s left with.”

Selena sighed and reached for the dinner plate. She took Jordan’s knife and fork and cut herself a piece, dipped it in cherry sauce. “This is some damn fine goose, Jordan,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

“The witness list,” Jordan said, standing up and rummaging through a stack of papers on the other end of the dining room table. “There’s got to be someone we haven’t called who can help us.” He scanned the names. “Who’s Louise Herrman?”

“Peter’s third-grade teacher,” Selena said, her mouth full.

“Why the hell is she on the witness list?”

“She called us,” Selena said. “She told us that if we needed her, she’d be willing to testify that he was a good boy in third grade.”

“Well, that’s not going to work. I need someone recent.” He sighed. “There’s nobody else here…” Flipping to the second page, he saw a single, final name typed. “Except Josie Cormier,” Jordan said slowly.

Selena put down her fork. “You’re calling Alex’s daughter?”

“Since when do you call Judge Cormier Alex?”

“The girl doesn’t remember anything.”

“Well, I’m completely screwed. Maybe she remembers something now. Let’s bring her in and see if she’ll talk.”

Selena sifted through the piles of papers that covered the serving table, the fireplace mantel, the top of Sam’s walker. “Here’s her statement,” she said, handing it to Jordan.

The first page was the affidavit that Judge Cormier had brought him-the one that said Jordan wouldn’t put Josie on the stand because she didn’t know anything. The second was the most recent interview the girl had given to Patrick Ducharme. “They’ve been friends since kindergarten.”

“Were friends.”

“I don’t care. Diana’s already laid the groundwork here-Peter had a crush on Josie; he killed her boyfriend. If we can get her to say something nice about him-maybe even to show that she forgives him-it will carry weight with the jury.” He stood up. “I’m going back to the courthouse,” he said. “I need a subpoena.”

When the doorbell rang on Saturday morning, Josie was still in her pajamas. She’d slept like the dead, which wasn’t surprising, because she hadn’t managed to sleep well all week. Her dreams were full of highways that carried only wheelchairs; of combination locks with no numbers; of beauty queens without faces.

She was the only person left sitting in the sequestered witness room, which meant that this was nearly over; that soon, she’d be able to breathe again.

Josie opened the door to find the tall, stunning African-American woman who was married to Jordan McAfee smiling at her, holding out a piece of paper. “I need to give you this, Josie,” she said. “Is your mom home?”

Josie took the folded blue note. Maybe it was like a cast party for the end of the trial. That would be kind of cool. She called for her mother over her shoulder. Alex appeared with Patrick trailing behind.

“Oh,” Selena said, blinking.

Unflappable, her mother folded her arms. “What’s going on?”

“Judge, I’m sorry to bother you on a Saturday, but my husband was wondering if Josie might be free to speak to him today.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s subpoenaed Josie to testify on Monday.”

The room started to spin. “Testify?” Josie repeated.

Her mother stepped forward, and from the look on her face, she probably would have done serious damage if Patrick hadn’t wrapped an arm around her waist to hold her back. He plucked the blue paper out of Josie’s hand and scanned it.

“I can’t go to court,” Josie murmured.

Her mother shook her head. “You have a signed affidavit from Josie stating that she doesn’t remember anything-”

“I know you’re upset. But the reality is, Jordan’s calling Josie on Monday, and we’d rather talk to her about her testimony beforehand than have her come in cold. It’s better for us, and it’s better for Josie.” She hesitated. “You can do it the hard way, Judge, or you can do it this way.”

Josie’s mother clenched her jaw. “Two o’clock,” she gritted out, and she slammed the door in Selena’s face.

“You promised,” Josie cried. “You promised me I didn’t have to get up there and testify. You said I wouldn’t have to do this!”

Her mother grabbed her by the shoulders. “Honey, I know this is scary. I know you don’t want to be there. But nothing you say is going to help him. It’s going to be very short and painless.” She glanced at Patrick. “Why the hell is he doing this?”

“Because his case is in the toilet,” Patrick said. “He wants Josie to save it.”

That was all it took: Josie burst into tears.

Jordan opened the door of his office, carrying Sam like a football in his arms. It was two o’clock on the dot, and Josie Cormier and her mother had arrived. Judge Cormier looked about as inviting as a sheer cliff wall; by contrast, her daughter was shaking like a leaf. “Thanks for coming,” he said, pasting an enormous, friendly smile on his face. Above all else, he wanted Josie to feel at ease.

Neither of the women said a word.

“I’m sorry about this,” Jordan said, gesturing toward Sam. “My wife was supposed to be here by now to get the baby so that we could talk, but a logging truck overturned on Route 10.” He stretched his smile wider. “It should only be a minute.”

He gestured toward the couch and chairs in his office, offering a seat. There were cookies on the table, and a pitcher of water. “Please have something to eat, or drink.”

“No,” the judge said.

Jordan sat down, bouncing the baby on his knee. “Right.”

He stared at the clock, amazed at how very long sixty seconds could be when you wanted them to pass quickly, and then suddenly the door flew open and Selena ran inside. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, flustered, reaching for the baby. As she did, the diaper bag fell off her shoulder, skittering across the floor to land in front of Josie.

Josie stood up, staring at Selena’s fallen backpack. She backed away, stumbling over her mother’s legs and the side of the couch. “No,” she whimpered, and she curled into a ball in the corner, covering her head with her hands as she started to cry. The noise set Sam off shrieking, and Selena pressed him up against her shoulder as Jordan watched, speechless.

Judge Cormier crouched beside her daughter. “Josie, what’s the matter. Josie? What’s going on?”

The girl rocked back and forth, sobbing. She glanced up at her mother. “I remember,” she whispered. “More than I said I did.”

The judge’s mouth dropped open, and Jordan used her shock to seize the moment. “What do you remember?” he asked, kneeling beside Josie.

Judge Cormier pushed him out of the way and helped Josie to her feet. She sat her down on the couch and poured her a glass of water from the pitcher on the table. “It’s okay,” the judge murmured.

Josie took a shuddering breath. “The backpack,” she said, jerking her chin toward the one on the floor. “It fell off Peter’s shoulder, like that one did. The zipper was open, and…and a gun fell out. Matt grabbed it.” Her face contorted. “He fired at Peter, but he missed. And Peter…and he…” She closed her eyes. “That’s when Peter shot him.”

Jordan caught Selena’s eye. Peter’s defense hinged on PTSD-how one event might trigger another; how a person who was traumatized might be unable to recall anything about the event at all. How someone like Josie might watch a diaper bag fall and instead see what had happened in the locker room months earlier: Peter, with a gun pointing at him-a real and present threat, a bully about to kill him.

Or, in other words, what Jordan had been saying all along.

“It’s a mess,” Jordan said to Selena after the Cormiers had gone home. “And that works for me.”

Selena hadn’t left with the baby; Sam was now asleep in an empty filing cabinet drawer. She and Jordan sat at the table where, less than an hour ago, Josie had confessed that she’d recently started to remember bits and pieces of the shooting but hadn’t told anyone, out of fear of having to go to court and talk about it. That when the diaper bag had fallen, it had all come flooding back, full-force.

“If I’d found this out before the trial started, I would have taken it to Diana and used it tactically,” Jordan said. “But since the jury’s already sitting, maybe I can do something even better.”

“Nothing like an eleventh-hour Hail Mary pass,” Selena said.

“Let’s assume we put Josie on the stand to say all this in court. All of a sudden, those ten deaths aren’t what they seemed to be. No one knew the real story behind this one, and that calls into question everything else the prosecution’s told the jury about the shootings. In other words, if the state didn’t know this, what else don’t they know?”

“And,” Selena pointed out, “it highlights what King Wah said. Here was one of the kids who’d tormented Peter, holding a gun on him, just like he’d figured all along would happen.” She hesitated. “Granted, Peter was the one who brought in the gun…”

“That’s irrelevant,” Jordan said. “I don’t have to have all the answers.” He kissed Selena square on the mouth. “I just need to make sure that the state doesn’t either.”

Alex sat on the bench, watching a ragged crew of college students playing Ultimate Frisbee as if they had no idea that the world had split at its seams. Beside her, Josie hugged her knees to her chest. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Alex asked.

Josie lifted her face. “I couldn’t. You were the judge on the case.”

Alex felt a stab beneath her breastbone. “But even after I recused myself, Josie…when we went to see Jordan, and you said you didn’t remember anything…That’s why I had you swear the affidavit.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted me to do,” Josie said. “You told me if I signed it, I wouldn’t have to be a witness…and I didn’t want to go to court. I didn’t want to see Peter again.”

One of the college players leaped and missed the Frisbee. It sailed toward Alex, landing in a scuffle of dust at her feet. “Sorry,” the boy called, waving.

Alex picked it up and sent it soaring. The wind lifted the Frisbee and carried it higher, a stain against a perfectly blue sky.

“Mommy,” Josie said, although she had not called Alex that for years. “What’s going to happen to me?”

She didn’t know. Not as a judge, not as a lawyer, not as a mother. The only thing she could do was offer good counsel and hope it withstood what was yet to come. “From here on out,” Alex told Josie, “all you have to do is tell the truth.”

Patrick had been called into a domestic-violence hostage negotiation down in Cornish and did not reach Sterling until it was nearly midnight. Instead of heading to his own house, he went to Alex’s-it felt more like home, anyway. He’d tried to call her several times today to see what had happened with Jordan McAfee, but he couldn’t get cell phone service where he was.

He found her sitting in the dark on the living room sofa, and sank down beside her. For a moment, he stared at the wall, just like Alex. “What are we doing?” he whispered.

She faced him, and that’s when he realized she had been crying. He blamed himself-You should have tried harder to call, you should have come home earlier. “What’s wrong?”

“I screwed up, Patrick,” Alex said. “I thought I was helping her. I thought I knew what I was doing. As it turned out, I didn’t know anything at all.”

“Josie?” he asked, trying to fit together the pieces. “Where is she?”

“Asleep. I gave her a sleeping pill.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“We saw Jordan McAfee today, and Josie told him…she told him that she remembered something about the shooting. In fact, she remembered everything.”

Patrick whistled softly. “So she was lying?”

“I don’t know. I think she was scared.” Alex glanced up at Patrick. “That’s not all. According to Josie, Matt shot at Peter first.”

“What?”

“The knapsack Peter was carrying fell down in front of Matt, and he got hold of one of the guns. He shot, but he missed.”

Patrick rubbed a hand down his face. Diana Leven was not going to be happy.

“What’s going to happen to Josie?” Alex said. “The best-case scenario is that she gets on the stand and the entire town hates her for testifying on Peter’s behalf. The worst-case scenario is that she commits perjury on the stand and gets charged with it.”

Patrick’s mind was racing. “You can’t worry about this. It’s out of your hands. Besides, Josie will be fine. She’s a survivor.”

He leaned down and kissed her, softly, his mouth rounding over words he couldn’t yet tell her, and promises he was afraid to make. He kissed her until he felt the tightness go out of her spine. “You ought to go take one of those sleeping pills,” he whispered.

Alex tilted her head. “You’re not staying?”

“Can’t. I’ve still got work to do.”

“You came all the way over here to tell me you’re leaving?”

Patrick looked at her, wishing he could explain what he had to do. “I’ll see you later, Alex,” he said.

Alex had confided in him, but as a judge, she would know that Patrick could not keep her secret. On Monday morning, when Patrick saw the prosecutor, he’d have to tell Diana what he now knew about Matt Royston firing the first shot in the locker room. Legally, he was obligated to disclose this new wrinkle. However, technically, he had all day Sunday to do with that information whatever he liked.

If Patrick could find evidence to back up Josie’s allegations, then it would soften the blow for her on the stand-and make him a hero in Alex’s eyes. But there was another part of him that wanted to search the locker room again for another reason. Patrick knew he had personally combed that small space for evidence, that no other bullet had been found. And if Matt had shot first at Peter, there should have been one.

He hadn’t wanted to say this to Alex, but Josie had lied to them once. There was no reason she couldn’t be doing it again.

At six in the morning, Sterling High School was a sleeping giant. Patrick unlocked the front door and moved through the corridors in the dark. They had been professionally cleaned, but that didn’t stop him from seeing, in the beam of his flashlight, the spots where bullets had broken windows and blood had stained the floor. He moved quickly, the heels of his boots echoing, as he pushed aside blue construction tarps and avoided stacks of lumber.

Patrick opened the double doors of the gym and squeaked his way across the Morse-coded markings on the polyurethaned boards. He flicked a bank of switches and the gym flooded with light. The last time he’d been in here, there had been emergency blankets lying on the floor, corresponding to the numbers that had been inked on the foreheads of Noah James and Michael Beach and Justin Friedman and Dusty Spears and Austin Prokiov. There had been crime-scene techs crawling on their hands and knees, taking photographs of chips in the cement block, digging bullets out of the backboard of the basketball hoop.

He had spent hours at the police station, his first stop after leaving Alex’s house, scrutinizing the enlarged fingerprint that had been on Gun B. An inconclusive one; one that he’d assumed, lazily, to be Peter’s. But what if it was Matt’s? Was there any way to prove that Royston had held the gun, as Josie claimed? Patrick had studied the prints taken from Matt’s dead body and held them up every which way against the partial print, until the lines and ridges blurred even more than they should have.

If he was going to find proof, it was going to have to be in the school itself.

The locker room looked exactly like the photo he’d used during his testimony earlier this week, except that the bodies, of course, had been removed. Unlike the corridors and classrooms of the school, the locker room hadn’t been cleaned or patched. The small area held too much damage-not physical, but psychological-and the administration had unanimously agreed to tear it down, along with the rest of the gym and the cafeteria, later this month.

The locker room was a rectangle. The door that led into it, from the gym, was in the middle of one long wall. A wooden bench sat directly opposite, and a line of metal lockers. In the far left corner of the locker room was a small doorway that opened into a communal shower stall. In this corner, Matt’s body had been found, with Josie lying beside him; thirty feet away in the far right corner of the locker room, Peter had been crouching. The blue backpack had fallen just to the left of the doorway.

If Patrick believed Josie, then Peter had come running into the locker room, where Josie and Matt had gone to hide. Presumably, he was holding Gun A. He dropped his backpack, and Matt-who would have been standing in the middle of the room, close enough to reach it-grabbed Gun B. Matt shot at Peter-the bullet that had never been found, the one that proved Gun B was fired at all-and missed. When he tried to shoot again, the gun jammed. At that moment, Peter shot him, twice.

The problem was, Matt’s body had been found at least fifteen feet away from the backpack where he’d grabbed the gun.

Why would Matt have backed up, and then shot at Peter? It didn’t make sense. It was possible that Peter’s shots had sent Matt’s body recoiling, but basic physics told Patrick that a shot fired from where Peter was standing would still not have landed Matt where he’d been found. In addition, there had been no blood-spatter pattern to suggest that Matt had been standing anywhere near the backpack when he was hit by Peter. He’d pretty much dropped where he’d been shot.

Patrick walked toward the wall where he’d apprehended Peter. He started at the upper corner and methodically ran his fingers over every divot and niche, over the edges of the lockers and inside them, around the bend of the perpendicular walls. He crawled beneath the wooden bench and scrutinized the underside. He held his flashlight up to the ceiling. In such close quarters, any bullet fired by Matt should have made enough serious damage to be noticeable, and yet, there was absolutely no evidence that any gun had been fired-successfully-in Peter’s direction.

Patrick walked to the opposite corner of the locker room. There was still a dark bloodstain on the floor, and a dried boot print. He stepped over the stain and into the shower stall, repeating the same meticulous investigation of the tiled wall that would have been behind Matt.

If he found that missing bullet here, where Matt’s body had been found, then Matt clearly hadn’t been the one to fire Gun B-it would have been Peter wielding that weapon, as well as Gun A. Or in other words: Josie would have been lying to Jordan McAfee.

It was easy work, because the tile was white, pristine. There were no cracks or flakes, no chips, nothing that would suggest a bullet had gone through Matt’s stomach and struck the shower wall.

Patrick turned around, looking in places that didn’t make sense: the top of the shower, the ceiling, the drain. He took off his shoes and socks and shuffled along the shower floor.

It was when he’d just scraped his little toe along the line of the drain that he felt it.

Patrick got down on his hands and knees and felt along the edge of the metal. There was a long, raw scuff on the tile that bordered the drainage grate. It would have easily gone unnoticed because of its location-techs who saw it had probably assumed it was grout. He rubbed it with his finger and then peered with a flashlight into the drain. If the bullet had slipped through, it was long gone-and yet, the drainage holes were tiny enough that this shouldn’t have been possible.

Opening a locker, Patrick ripped a tiny square of mirror off with his hands and set it face-up on the floor of the shower, just where the scuff mark was. Then he turned off the lights and took out a laser pointer. He stood where Peter had been apprehended and pointed the beam at the mirror, watched it bounce onto the far wall of the showers, where no bullet had left a mark.

Circling around, he continued to point the beam until it ricocheted up-right through the center of a small window that served as ventilation. He knelt, marking the spot where he stood with a pencil from his pocket. Then he dug out his cell phone. “Diana,” he said when the prosecutor answered. “Don’t let that trial start tomorrow.”

“I know it’s unusual,” Diana said in court the next morning, “and that we have a jury sitting here, but I have to ask for a recess until my detective gets here. He’s investigating something new on the case…possibly something exculpatory.”

“Have you called him?” Judge Wagner asked.

“Several times.” Patrick was not answering his phone. If he was, then she could have told him directly how much she wanted to kill him.

“I have to object, Your Honor,” Jordan said. “We’re ready to go forward. I’m sure that Ms. Leven will give me that exculpatory information, if and when it ever arrives, but I’m willing at this point to take my chances. And since we’re all here at the bench, I’d like to add that I have a witness who’s prepared to testify right now.”

“What witness?” Diana said. “You don’t have anyone else to call.”

He smiled at her. “Judge Cormier’s daughter.”

Alex sat outside the courtroom, holding tight to Josie’s hand. “This is going to be over before you know it.”

The great irony here, Alex knew, was that months ago when she’d fought so hard to be the judge on this case, it was because she felt more at ease offering legal comfort to her daughter than emotional comfort. Well, here she was, and Josie was about to testify in the arena Alex knew better than anyone else, and she still didn’t have any grand judicial advice that could help her.

It would be scary. It would be painful. And all Alex could do was watch her suffer.

A bailiff came out to them. “Judge,” he said. “If your daughter’s ready?”

Alex squeezed Josie’s hand. “Just tell them what you know,” she said, and she stood up to take a seat in the courtroom.

“Mom?” Josie called after her, and Alex turned. “What if what you know isn’t what people want to hear?”

Alex tried to smile. “Tell the truth,” she said. “You can’t lose.”

To comply with discovery rules, Jordan handed Diana a synopsis of Josie’s testimony as she was walking up to the stand. “When did you get this?” the prosecutor whispered.

“This weekend. Sorry,” he said, although he really wasn’t. He walked toward Josie, who looked small and pale. Her hair had been gathered into a neat ponytail, and her hands were folded in her lap. She was studiously avoiding anyone’s gaze by focusing on the grain of the wood on the rail of the witness stand.

“Can you state your name?”

“Josie Cormier.”

“Where do you live, Josie?”

“45 East Prescott Street, in Sterling.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m seventeen,” she said.

Jordan took a step closer, so that only she would be able to hear him. “See?” he murmured. “Piece of cake.” He winked at her, and he thought she might even have smiled back the tiniest bit.

“Where were you on the morning of March 6, 2007?”

“I was at school.”

“What class did you have first period?”

“English,” Josie said softly.

“What about second period?”

“Math.”

“Third period?”

“I had a study.”

“Where did you spend it?”

“With my boyfriend,” she said. “Matt Royston.” She looked sideways, blinking too fast.

“Where were you and Matt during third period?”

“We left the cafeteria. We were going to his locker, before the next class.”

“What happened then?”

Josie looked into her lap. “There was a lot of noise. And people started running. People were screaming about guns, about someone with a gun. A friend of ours, Drew Girard, told us it was Peter.”

She glanced up then, and her eyes locked on Peter’s. For a long moment, she just stared at him, and then she closed her eyes and turned away.

“Did you know what was going on?”

“No.”

“Did you see anyone shooting?”

“No.”

“Where did you go?”

“To the gym. We ran across it, toward the locker room. I knew he was coming closer, because I kept hearing gunshots.”

“Who was with you when you went into the locker room?”

“I thought Drew and Matt, but when I turned around, I realized that Drew wasn’t there. He’d been shot.”

“Did you see Drew getting shot?”

Josie shook her head. “No.”

“Did you see Peter before you got into the locker room?”

“No.” Her face crumpled, and she wiped at her eyes.

“Josie,” Jordan said, “what happened next?”

10:16 A.M., The Day Of

G et down,” Matt hissed, and he shoved Josie so that she fell behind the wooden bench.

It wasn’t a good place to hide, but then, nowhere in the locker room was a good place to hide. Matt’s plan had been to climb out the window in the shower, and he’d even opened it up, but then they’d heard the shots in the gym and realized they didn’t have time to drag the bench over and climb through. They’d boxed themselves in, literally.

She curled herself into a ball and Matt crouched down in front of her. Her heart thundered against his back, and she kept forgetting to breathe.

He reached behind him until he found her hand. “If anything happens, Jo,” he whispered, “I loved you.”

Josie started to cry. She was going to die; they were all going to die. She thought of a hundred things she hadn’t done yet that she so badly wanted to do: go to Australia, swim with dolphins. Learn all the words to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Graduate.

Get married.

She wiped her face against the back of Matt’s shirt, and then the locker room burst open. Peter stumbled inside, his eyes wild, holding a handgun. His left sneaker was untied, Josie noticed, and then she couldn’t believe she noticed. He lifted his gun at Matt, and she couldn’t help it; she screamed.

Maybe it was the noise; maybe it was her voice. It startled Peter, and he dropped his backpack. It slid off his shoulder, and as it did, another gun fell out of an open pocket.

It skittered across the floor, landing just behind Josie’s left foot.

Do you know how there are moments when the world moves so slowly you can feel your bones shifting, your mind tumbling? When you think that no matter what happens to you for the rest of your life, you will remember every last detail of that one minute forever? Josie watched her hand stretch back, watched her fingers curl around the cold black butt of the gun. Fumbling it, she staggered upright, pointing the gun at Peter.

Matt backed away toward the showers, under Josie’s cover. Peter held his gun steady, still pointing it at Matt, even though Josie was closer. “Josie,” he said. “Let me finish this.”

“Shoot him, Josie,” Matt said. “Fucking shoot him.”

Peter pulled back the slide of the gun so that a bullet from the clip would cycle into place. Watching him carefully, Josie mimicked his actions.

She remembered being in nursery school with Peter-how other boys would pick up sticks or rocks and run around yelling Hands up. What had she and Peter used the sticks for? She couldn’t recall.

“Josie, for Christ’s sake!” Matt was sweating, his eyes wide. “Are you fucking stupid?”

“Don’t talk to her like that,” Peter cried.

“Shut up, asshole,” Matt said. “You think she’s going to save you?” He turned to Josie. “What are you waiting for? Shoot.”

So she did.

As the gun fired, it ripped two stripes of her skin from the base of her thumb. Her hands jerked upward, numb, humming. The blood was black on Matt’s gray T-shirt. He stood for a moment, shocked, his hand over the wound in his stomach. She saw his mouth close around her name, but she couldn’t hear it, her ears were ringing so loudly. Josie? and then he fell to the floor.

Josie’s hand started shaking violently; she wasn’t surprised when the gun just fell out of it, as singularly repelled by her grasp as it had been glued to it moments before. “Matt,” she cried, running toward him. She pressed her hands against the blood, because that’s what you were supposed to do, wasn’t it, but he writhed and screamed in agony. Blood began to bubble out of his mouth, trailing down his neck. “Do something,” she sobbed, turning to Peter. “Help me.”

Peter walked closer, lifted the gun he was holding, and shot Matt in the head.

Horrified, she scrambled backward, away from them both. That wasn’t what she’d meant; that couldn’t have been what she meant.

She stared at Peter, and she realized that in that one moment, when she hadn’t been thinking, she knew exactly what he’d felt as he moved through the school with his backpack and his guns. Every kid in this school played a role: jock, brain, beauty, freak. All Peter had done was what they all secretly dreamed of: be someone, even for just nineteen minutes, who nobody else was allowed to judge.

“Don’t tell,” Peter whispered, and Josie realized he was offering her a way out-a deal sealed in blood, a partnership of silence: I won’t share your secrets, if you don’t share mine.

Josie nodded slowly, and then her world went black.

I think a person’s life is supposed to be like a DVD. You can see the version everyone else sees, or you can choose the director’s cut-the way he wanted you to see it, before everything else got in the way.

There are menus, probably, so that you can start at the good spots and not have to relive the bad ones. You can measure your life by the number of scenes you’ve survived, or the minutes you’ve been stuck there.

Probably, though, life is more like one of those dumb video surveillance tapes. Grainy, no matter how hard you stare at it. And looped: the same thing, over and over.

Five Months After

A lex pushed past the people in the gallery who had erupted in confusion in the wake of Josie’s confession. Somewhere in this crowd of people were the Roystons, who had just heard that their son had been shot by her daughter, but she could not think of that right now. She could only see Josie, trapped on that witness stand, while Alex struggled to get past the bar. She was a judge, dammit; she should have been allowed to go there, but two bailiffs were firmly holding her back.

Wagner was smacking his gavel, although nobody gave a damn. “We’ll take a fifteen-minute recess,” he ordered, and as another bailiff hauled Peter through a rear door, the judge turned to Josie. “Young lady,” he said, “you are still under oath.”

Alex watched Josie being taken through another door, and she called out after her. A moment later, Eleanor was at her side. The clerk took Alex’s arm. “Judge, come with me. You’re not safe out here right now.”

For the first time she could actively remember, Alex allowed herself to be led.

Patrick arrived in the courtroom just as it exploded. He saw Josie on the stand, crying desperately; he saw Judge Wagner fighting for control-but most of all, he saw Alex single-mindedly trying to get to her daughter.

He would have drawn his gun right then and there to help her do it.

By the time he fought his way down the central aisle of the courtroom, Alex was gone. He caught a glimpse of her as she slipped into a room behind the bench, and he hurdled the bar to follow her but felt someone grab his sleeve. Annoyed, he glanced down to see Diana Leven.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked.

“You first.”

He sighed. “I spent the night at Sterling High, trying to check Josie’s statement. It didn’t make sense-if Matt had fired at Peter, there should have been physical evidence of destruction in the wall behind him. I assumed that she was lying again-that Peter had been the one to shoot Matt unprovoked. Once I figured out where that first bullet hit, I used a laser to see where it could have ricocheted-and then I understood why we didn’t find it the first time around.” Digging in his coat, he extracted an evidence bag with a slug inside. “The fire department helped me dig it out of a maple tree outside the window in the shower stall. I drove it straight to the lab for testing-and stood over them all night with a whip until they agreed to do the work on the spot. Not only was the bullet fired from Gun B, it’s got blood and tissue on it that types to Matt Royston. The thing is, when you reverse the angle of that bullet-when you stand in the tree and ricochet the laser off the tile where it struck, to see where the shot originated from-you don’t get anywhere close to where Peter was standing. It was-”

The prosecutor sighed wearily. “Josie just confessed to shooting Matt Royston.”

“Well,” Patrick said, handing the evidence bag to Diana, “she’s finally telling the truth.”

Jordan leaned against the bars of the holding cell. “Did you forget to tell me about this?”

“No,” Peter said.

He turned. “You know, if you’d mentioned this at the beginning, your case could have had a very different outcome.”

Peter was lying on the bench in the cell, his hands behind his head. To Jordan’s shock, he was smiling. “She was my friend again,” Peter explained. “You don’t break a promise to a friend.”

Alex sat in the dark of the conference room where defendants were usually brought during breaks, and realized that her daughter now would qualify. There would be another trial, and this time Josie would be at the center of it.

“Why?” she asked.

She could make out the silver edge of Josie’s profile. “Because you told me to tell the truth.”

“What is the truth?”

“I loved Matt. And I hated him. I hated myself for loving him, but if I wasn’t with him, I wasn’t anyone anymore.”

“I don’t understand…”

“How could you? You’re perfect.” Josie shook her head. “The rest of us, we’re all like Peter. Some of us just do a better job of hiding it. What’s the difference between spending your life trying to be invisible, or pretending to be the person you think everyone wants you to be? Either way, you’re faking.”

Alex thought of all the parties she’d ever gone to where the first question she was asked was What do you do? as if that were enough to define you. Nobody ever asked you who you really were, because that changed. You might be a judge or a mother or a dreamer. You might be a loner or a visionary or a pessimist. You might be the victim, and you might be the bully. You could be the parent, and also the child. You might wound one day and heal the next.

I’m not perfect, Alex thought, and maybe that was the first step toward becoming that way.

“What’s going to happen to me?” Josie asked, the same question she’d asked a day ago, when Alex thought herself qualified to give answers.

“What’s going to happen to us,” Alex corrected.

A smile chased over Josie’s face, gone almost as quickly as it had come. “I asked you first.”

The door to the conference room opened, spilling light from the corridor, silhouetting whatever came next. Alex reached for her daughter’s hand and took a deep breath. “Let’s go see,” she said.

Peter was convicted of eight first-degree murders and two second-degree murders. The jury decided that in the case of Matt Royston and Courtney Ignatio, he had not been acting with premeditation and deliberation. He’d been provoked.

After the verdict was handed down, Jordan met with Peter in the holding cell. He’d be brought back to the jail only until the sentencing hearing; then he would be transferred to the state prison in Concord. Serving out eight consecutive murder sentences, he would not leave it alive.

“You okay?” Jordan asked, putting his hand on Peter’s shoulder.

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “I sort of knew it was going to happen.”

“But they heard you. That’s why they came back with manslaughter for two of the counts.”

“I guess I should say thanks for trying.” He smiled crookedly at Jordan. “Have a good life.”

“I’ll come see you, if I get down to Concord,” Jordan said.

He looked at Peter. In the six months since this case had fallen into his lap, his client had grown up. Peter was as tall as Jordan now. He probably weighed a little more. He had a deeper voice, a shadow of beard on his jaw. Jordan marveled that he hadn’t noticed these things until now.

“Well,” Jordan said. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out the way I’d hoped.”

“Me, too.”

Peter held out his hand, and Jordan embraced him instead. “Take care.”

He started out of the cell, and then Peter called him back. He was holding out the eyeglasses Jordan had brought him for the trial. “These are yours,” Peter said.

“Hang on to them. You have more use for them.”

Peter tucked the glasses into the front pocket of Jordan’s jacket. “I kind of like knowing you’re taking care of them,” he said. “And there isn’t all that much I really want to see.”

Jordan nodded. He walked out of the holding cell and said good-bye to the deputies. Then he headed toward the lobby, where Selena was waiting.

As he approached her, he put on Peter’s glasses. “What’s up with those?” she asked.

“I kind of like them.”

“You have perfect vision,” Selena pointed out.

Jordan considered the way the lenses made the world curve in at the ends, so that he had to move more gingerly through it. “Not always,” he said.

In the weeks after the trial, Lewis began fooling around with numbers. He’d done some preliminary research and entered it into STATA to see what kinds of patterns emerged. And-here was the interesting thing-it had absolutely nothing to do with happiness. Instead, he’d started looking at the communities where school shootings had occurred in the past and spinning them out to the present, to see how a single act of violence might affect economic stability. Or in other words-once the world was pulled out from beneath your feet, did you ever get to stand on firm ground again?

He was teaching again at Sterling College-basic microeconomics. Classes had only just begun in late September, and Lewis found himself slipping easily into the lecture circuit. When he was talking about Keynesian models and widgets and competition, it was routine-so effortless that he could almost make himself believe this was any other freshman survey course he’d taught in the past, before Peter had been convicted.

Lewis taught by walking up and down the aisles-a necessary evil, now that the campus had gone WiFi and students would play online poker or IM each other while he lectured-which was how he happened to come across the kids in the back. Two football players were taking turns squeezing a sports-top water bottle so that the stream arced upward and sprayed onto the back of another kid’s neck. The boy, two rows forward, kept turning around to see who was squirting water at him, but by then, the jocks were looking up at the graphs on the screen in the front of the hall, their faces as smooth as choirboys’.

“Now,” Lewis said, not missing a beat, “who can tell me what happens if you set the price above point A on the graph?” He plucked the water bottle out of the hands of one of the jocks. “Thank you, Mr. Graves. I was getting thirsty.”

The boy two rows ahead raised his hand like an arrow, and Lewis nodded at him. “No one would want to buy the widget for that much money,” he said. “So demand would fall, and that means the price would have to drop, or they’d wind up with a whole boatload of extras in the warehouse.”

“Excellent,” Lewis said, and he glanced up at the clock. “All right, guys, on Monday we’ll be covering the next chapter in Mankiw. And don’t be surprised if there’s a surprise quiz.”

“If you told us, it’s not a surprise,” a girl pointed out.

Lewis smiled. “Oops.”

He stood by the chair of the boy who’d given the right answer. He was stuffing his notebook into his backpack, which was already so crammed with papers that the zipper wouldn’t close. His hair was too long, and his T-shirt had a picture of Einstein’s face on it. “Nice work today.”

“Thanks.” The boy shifted from one foot to the other; Lewis could tell that he wasn’t quite sure what to say next. He thrust out his hand. “Um, nice to meet you. I mean, you’ve already met us all, but not, like, personally.”

“Right. What’s your name again?”

“Peter. Peter Granford.”

Lewis opened up his mouth to speak, but then just shook his head.

“What?” The boy ducked his head. “You just, uh, looked like you were going to say something important.”

Lewis looked at this namesake, at the way he stood with his shoulders rounded, as if he did not deserve so much space in this world. He felt that familiar pain that fell like a hammer on his breastbone whenever he thought of Peter, of a life that would be lost to prison. He wished he’d taken more time to look at Peter when Peter was right in front of his eyes, because now he would be forced to compensate with imperfect memories or-even worse-to find his son in the faces of strangers.

Lewis reached deep inside and unraveled the smile that he saved for moments like this, when there was absolutely nothing to be happy about. “It was important,” he said. “You remind me of someone I used to know.”

It took Lacy three weeks to gather the courage to enter Peter’s bedroom. Now that the verdict had been handed down-now that they knew Peter would never be coming home again-there was no reason to keep it as she had for the past five months: a shrine, a haven for optimism.

She sat down on Peter’s bed and brought his pillow to her face. It still smelled like him, and she wondered how long it would take for that to dissipate. She glanced around at the scattered books on his shelves-the ones that the police had not taken. She opened his nightstand drawer and fingered the silky tassel of a bookmark, the metal teeth of a lockjawed stapler. The empty belly of a television remote control, missing its batteries. A magnifying glass. An old pack of Pokémon cards, a magic trick, a portable hard drive on a key-chain.

Lacy took the box she’d brought up from the basement and placed each item inside. Here was the crime scene: look at what was left behind and try to re-create the boy.

She folded his quilt, and then his sheets, and then pulled the pillowcase free. She suddenly recalled a dinner conversation where Lewis had told her that for $10,000, you could flatten a house with a wrecking ball. Imagine how much less it took to destroy something than it did to build it in the first place: in less than an hour, this room would look as if Peter had never lived here at all.

When it was all a neat pile, Lacy sat back down on the bed and looked around at the stark walls, the paint a little brighter in the spots where posters had been. She touched the piped seam of Peter’s mattress and wondered how long she would continue to think of it as Peter’s.

Love was supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it fell apart at the details. It couldn’t save a single child-not the ones who’d gone to Sterling High that day, expecting the normal; not Josie Cormier; certainly not Peter. So what was the recipe? Was it love, mixed with something else for good measure? Luck? Hope? Forgiveness?

She remembered, suddenly, what Alex Cormier had said to her during the trial: Something still exists as long as there’s someone around to remember it.

Everyone would remember Peter for nineteen minutes of his life, but what about the other nine million? Lacy would have to be the keeper of those, because it was the only way for that part of Peter to stay alive. For every recollection of him that involved a bullet or a scream, she would have a hundred others: of a little boy splashing in a pond, or riding a bicycle for the first time, or waving from the top of a jungle gym. Of a kiss good night, or a crayoned Mother’s Day card, or a voice off-key in the shower. She would string them together-the moments when her child had been just like other people’s. She would wear them, precious pearls, every day of her life; because if she lost them, then the boy she had loved and raised and known would really be gone.

Lacy began to stretch the sheets over the bed again. She settled the quilt, tucked the corners, fluffed the pillow. She set the books back on the shelves and the toys and tools and knickknacks back in the nightstand. Last, she unrolled the long tongues of the posters and put them back up on the walls. She was careful to place the thumbtacks in the same original holes. That way, she wouldn’t be doing any more damage.

Exactly one month after he was convicted, when the lights were dimmed and the detention officers made a final sweep of the catwalk, Peter reached down and tugged off his right sock. He turned on his side in the lower bunk, so that he was facing the wall. He fed the sock into his mouth, stuffing it as far back as it would go.

When it got hard to breathe, he fell into a dream. He was still eighteen, but it was the first day of kindergarten. He was carrying his backpack and his Superman lunch box. The orange school bus pulled up and, with a sigh, split open its gaping jaws. Peter climbed the steps and faced the back of the bus, but this time, he was the only student on it. He walked down the aisle to the very end, near the emergency exit. He put his lunch box down beside him and glanced out the rear window. It was so bright he thought the sun itself must be chasing them down the highway.

“Almost there,” a voice said, and Peter turned around to look at the driver. But just as there had been no passengers, there was no one at the wheel.

Here was the amazing thing: in his dream, Peter wasn’t scared. He knew, somehow, that he was headed exactly where he’d wanted to go.

March 6, 2008

You might not have recognized Sterling High. There was a new green metal roof, fresh grass growing out front, and a glass atrium that rose two stories at the rear of the school. A plaque on the bricks by the front door read: A SAFE HARBOR.

Later today, there would be a ceremony to honor the memories of those who’d died here a year ago, but because Patrick had been involved in the new security protocols for the school, he’d been able to sneak Alex in for an advance viewing.

Inside, there were no lockers-just open cubbies, so that nothing was hidden from view. Students were in class; only a few teachers moved through the lobby. They wore IDs around their necks, as did the kids. Alex had not really understood this-the threat was always from the inside, not the outside-but Patrick said that it made people feel secure, and that was half the battle.

Her cell phone rang. Patrick sighed. “I thought you told them-”

“I did,” Alex said. She flipped it open, and the secretary for the Grafton County public defender’s office began reeling off a litany of crises. “Stop,” she said, interrupting. “Remember? I’m missing in action for the day.”

She had resigned her judicial appointment. Josie had been charged as an accessory to second-degree murder and accepted a plea of manslaughter, with five years served. After that, every time Alex had a child in her courtroom charged with a felony, she couldn’t be impartial. As a judge, weighing the evidence had taken precedence; but as a mother, it was not the facts that mattered-only the feelings. Going back to her roots as a public defender seemed not only natural but comfortable. She understood, firsthand, what her clients were feeling. She visited them when she went to visit her daughter at the women’s penitentiary. Defendants liked her because she wasn’t condescending and because she told them the truth about their chances: what you saw of Alex Cormier was what you got.

Patrick led her to the spot that had once housed the back staircase at Sterling High. Instead, now, there was an enormous glass atrium that covered the spot where the gymnasium and locker room had been. Outside, you could see the playing fields, where a gym class was now in the thick of a soccer game, taking advantage of the early spring and the melted snow. Inside, there were wooden tables set up, with stools where students could meet or have a snack or read. A few kids were there now, studying for a geometry test. Their whispers rose like smoke to the ceiling: complementary…supplementary…intersection…endpoint.

To one side of the atrium, in front of the glass wall, were ten chairs. Unlike the rest of the seats in the atrium, these had backs and were painted white. You had to look closely to see that they had been bolted to the floor, instead of having been dragged over by students and left behind. They were not lined up in a row; they were not evenly spaced. They did not have names or placards on them, but everyone knew why they were there.

She felt Alex come up behind her and slide his arm around her waist. “It’s almost time,” he said, and she nodded.

As she reached for one of the empty stools and started to drag it closer to the glass wall, Patrick took it from her. “For God’s sake, Patrick,” she muttered. “I’m pregnant, not terminal.”

That had been a surprise, too. The baby was due at the end of May. Alex tried not to think about it as a replacement for the daughter who would still be in jail for the next four years; she imagined instead that maybe this would be the one who rescued them all.

Patrick sank down beside her on a stool as Alex looked at her watch: 10:02 a.m.

She took a deep breath. “It doesn’t look the same anymore.”

“I know,” Patrick said.

“Do you think that’s a good thing?”

He thought for a moment. “I think it’s a necessary thing,” he said.

She noticed that the maple tree, the one that had grown outside the window of the second-story locker room, had not been cut down during the construction of the atrium. From where she was sitting, you couldn’t see the hole that had been carved out of it to retrieve a bullet. The tree was enormous, with a thick gnarled trunk and twisted limbs. It had probably been here long before the high school ever was, maybe even before Sterling was settled.

10:09.

She felt Patrick’s hand slip into her lap as she watched the soccer game. The teams seemed grossly mismatched, the kids who had already hit puberty playing against those who were still slight and small. Alex watched a striker charge a defenseman for the other team, leaving the smaller boy trampled as the ball hurtled high into the net.

All that, Alex thought, and nothing’s changed. She glanced at her watch again: 10:13.

The last few minutes, of course, were the hardest. Alex found herself standing, her hands pressed flat against the glass. She felt the baby kick inside her, answering back to the darker hook of her heart. 10:16. 10:17.

The striker returned to the spot where the defenseman had fallen and reached out his hand to help the slighter boy stand. They walked back to center field, talking about something Alex couldn’t hear.

It was 10:19.

She happened to glance at the maple tree again. The sap was still running. A few weeks from now, there would be a reddish hue on the branches. Then buds. A burst of first leaves.

Alex took Patrick’s hand. They walked out of the atrium in silence, down the corridors, past the rows of cubbies. They crossed the lobby and threshold of the front door, retracing the steps they’d taken.