God, but that forgiveness, granted before I even asked, just waiting for me, felt so sweet. I did blame myself for Spencer, terribly, and tears started in my eyes. It hit me all over again, how deeply I knew this man: his strength, his character, our history. My fear of his answer lost volume in my heart.

This was Trey, who had gone with me into labor rooms, three times. The one who’d held me up at Betsy’s funeral. Those were the only other times I’d been reduced down to an animal, as I was now, and three of those occasions had ended in such joy. He’d always given me exactly what I needed in my hardest moments, and his instant grace now felt like a promise. He would give me what I needed now.

“Tell me,” I said. He knew what I meant.

“Lexie Pine.” My heart sank to hear her name again. “What did Ansel—Adam tell you?” Now he was the one looking anxious, trying to find judgment in my eyes. I had none for him, though. All I had was love and waiting.

“Just that name,” I said. “His son is missing, too. He and his wife aren’t doing well. She’s medicating heavily, and she lost it. He gave us the name and threw us out.”

Trey stood up and walked away, and I could see fury in his back and spine. “So Lexie Pine took Robert? Lexie Pine was the woman you saw outside our window?”

“No,” I said. “We believe the old woman is her mother. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

He scrubbed at his face with both hands, and I saw that his eyes were leaking. The knowledge that Robert was in the hands of a crazy, vicious woman who had already harmed one child and that it was connected to his own past, it had wrecked him.

“I should have believed you when you first said there was a witch in our yard. I should have gone out and found her, held her, had her arrested.”

“Stop it,” I said.

He didn’t. “And it’s my history. Mine and Spencer’s, and Ansel’s, too, that caused all this.”

“You can tell me.” I went to him and took his hands, squeezing hard.

“It’s not a good story. I don’t look good in it. But it’s not—” He squeezed my hands back, more tears leaking. “I didn’t do anything that would justify her taking Robert.”

“Nothing on earth justifies that,” I said. Robert had yet to take a step or speak a word. “I blame her. Not you. But I have to understand how this began. So we can end it. You have to tell me. You have to tell me all of it.”

He closed his eyes. He swallowed. And he did.

16

Before I met Kelly Wilkerson, What did you do? was such an angry question that the dear, familiar shape of my husband twisted into a monster when I tried to look at him through the lens of it. I’d had crazy ideas about how to know if his answer was the truth.

I would hold his hand, feeling for a pulse jump when he lied. Or I’d make him swear on his daughters’ lives after every sentence that each word had been gospel. Robert’s life, actually hanging in the balance, was too frail a thing to swear on. I’d watch for his lawyer tells, the confidential lean-in or the skeptical cocked eyebrow that I’d seen him practice for his closing arguments. On some cop show, the main detective said that people look up toward the right when they lied, trying to access the creative side of the brain. People telling the truth looked up and left, toward where their memories were stored. I’d planned to watch his eyes when I finally asked. I would convict him with his own glances.

But as he spoke, he barely looked up at all. We sat down together, and he told the story to his hands, clasped tightly in his lap, and I understood how foolish those ideas had been.

As if truth ever gave itself away so cheaply.

Back in high school, I’d played Blanche DuBois in a version of Streetcar Named Desire that was edited for teens. Our Stanley genuinely had no idea why he was yelling “Stelllllaaaaa!” in the road. He shook his fist and screamed the name because the script said it was time. But I’d read the unredacted play. I knew what happened in the lines and moments we were deemed too young to say or even know. As Blanche I lied like it was breathing, a necessary thing she didn’t even notice she was doing. In that show I’d been Bree, pretending to be Blanche, who was pretending to be truthful, even to herself.

So I knew that people could tell lies in layers, and yet as Trey spoke, I thought that he was being genuine. Only a monster, a sociopath, could rack himself with such deep-set shame over a lie. And I had not married a monster.

When he did meet my gaze, I let my face show all my love and faith. I wanted him to understand that he was safe. I might not like his story, but I had accepted that no matter what Trey had done and no matter the mistakes I’d made, Robert’s absence, the danger he was in, was on the mother’s tab. Not ours. Now I simply wanted the truth.

“Do you remember 1992?” he asked. I nodded, but I shrugged at the same time. I’d been nine or so. “The Internet had just opened to the public. It didn’t have pictures yet, much less video. There were very few women online, or frat boys either. I think it was just scientists and nerds. I knew people who had cell phones, but they were still these chunky blocks. Nothing with a screen or Internet.”

“And this matters?” I asked, because even though his shame was palpable, this did not feel like the answer to my question. He nodded, though.

“What happened—what we did to Lexie Pine—it’s different now,” he told his hands.

I silenced myself. I listened. I let him set the scene.

In the early nineties, the Greeks whom Trey knew drank a lot and gobbled No Doz like it was PEZ during exams, but at Trey’s frat particularly drugs were seen as “hippie shit.” X was for Eurotrash, pot was for losers. Coke was the exception, because it felt so Wall Street. A real man’s drug, and many of his brothers were not averse to bumping up their weekends, privately in their rooms or bunched up in a bathroom stall. Never in the open. The norm was beer or swamp punch plus plenty of wine coolers for the ladies.

Spence was more chemically adventurous than most of his brothers, and he didn’t have a regular girlfriend. These things were probably what kept him from being the frat’s president. He dabbled in thoroughbred blondes, but he also went slumming with the patchouli-smelling girls who hung around the theatre department. The “Boho Hos,” he called them, not to be confused with the kind of uptight, bow-headed sorority girls who only did oral. Those were “Bow Hos.” Two syllables. Spence bounced back and forth between these types like the ball in Pong.