I swallowed. “I’m saying I want you to look at it. Really look.”

“Okay,” he said, a small impatience in his tone now. He glanced at the shot again, and then he shook his head. When he looked back to me, I saw a little anger in his eyes.

“I don’t know what you want me to say. It’s awful. They’re all awful. But we were high. And drunk. Maybe she was being loud. Or my hand landed there accidentally. Maybe she was kissing it. It’s a fraction of a fraction of a second, Bree.”

I didn’t like the irritated way he said my name. “I know, but, sweetheart, no matter how many times I looked at it, no matter the angle, I see a fraction of a second of a rape.”

It was the first time I’d said the word. It was like a small electric shock inside my mouth. He must have felt it, too. He stood up, rising so fast that I flinched. I never would have thought any move my husband made could cause me to flinch. Never in a thousand years.

“I told you what happened,” he said. “Everything, exactly as I remember it.”

He stared at me. Not the picture. His eyes refused to turn that way again. When I first saw the photos, I had not been able to look away. I’d stared and stared at the last shot, the pleading eyes, her blond hair in a matted tumble, trying to make Lexie tell me a different story. She had not.

I pointed to her. “Trey. Look. Really look.”

Instead he snatched the picture up, only that one, on the end, and began tearing at it. “I told you what happened. And sure, I was pretty high. Lexie got me high, remember? But I didn’t rape anyone. I would never rape someone.” He paused before the word “rape,” both times, as if it were too ugly to be allowed into his mouth. Much less his history.

I made myself stay seated and calm. I made my gaze stay only loving. This was my husband, my best friend, the father of my children. And this was hard for him. It had to be.

“You can tear it up, but you can’t unsee it. I can’t either. That photo shows me a girl who wanted out. If the evening happened like you said, even if she started it, in that shot I see a girl who changed her mind.”

“If?” he almost yelled. His chest heaved with fury or some other tightly leashed emotion. “If it happened like I said?”

I didn’t stop, though. “Maybe you don’t remember this part. Maybe she only changed her mind when she saw the camera. I could believe that. But you have to see. Even if you don’t remember it that way, even if you thought it was all fine the next morning, and every morning, up until this minute. That’s fine. I can believe that. But you have to see now. You have to face it. You have to fix it.”

“I cannot fucking believe—” He choked on the words.

I kept talking, calm, relentless, loving. “There’s a way past this. For you and me, maybe even for Lexie. We won’t know until we find her. She may be a murderer, in this hip-deep with her mother. Or she may not have known the things her mother planned to do. We can’t control that. We can only choose what we do. You can only choose what you do. Please don’t be too afraid to look and admit and try to make it right. Think if it was Anna-Claire in that photo. Think if it was Peyton.”

Something broke inside him then. His face flushed so dark it nearly purpled. I rose, too, reaching for him, worried he would have a stroke. He jerked away from my hands. He bent and snatched up the other pictures, tearing into all those small, trapped Lexies as he spoke, his voice graveled with fury.

“That would never happen to my girls. That would never happen.”

I said his name, but he talked over me, tearing and tearing at the photos, little flecks of destroyed paper drifting down.

“Neither of my daughters would be buying drugs, inviting boys for threesomes. My daughters would never be in that room in the first goddamn place. This was her fucking idea, Bree. Lexie’s. Her idea, her drugs, her choice. She wasn’t raised like my girls have been raised.”

My reaching hands dropped to my sides. Coral was dead, and I was fiercely glad, and yet, as my husband said these things to me, cursed me, spoke to me with such fury that flecks of spittle hit my face, I felt the tug of our old connection. From back when she had owned me. From back when I was hers.

I said quietly, “You’re right. Lexie Pine was raised like me.”

That pushed all his breath out again. He tilted his head back, staring down his nose at me, his nostrils flaring. Then he threw the pictures at me. They were shredded so small that the air caught them. They sprinkled down slowly between us in a fall like snow.

“You are nothing like Lexie Pine,” he said. “You never were.”

In those words I felt the whole world shift. Because he was wrong. I had been. Her own mother had seen it, so much so she changed her ruthless plan to make a deal with me. She’d given Spencer and Adam no choices; she’d shown poor Kelly Wilkerson no mercy. She had bent for me alone, and that bending had let me save my son. His words did more than shift our past. It rewrote history.

What if I had not been in character that day in the High Museum? No theatre-department-borrowed dress, no Betsy-borrowed confidence. Sabreena Kroger, in her thrift-store jeans and faded madras top, hair undone, face bare, skate-walking through the museum in flip-flops, would not have caught his eye. Instead I’d been playing the exact girl he should have married in the first place. Impeccably groomed and expensively clothed, like Maura, but family-oriented, not career-ambitious. I looked like the girl that fit the dreams he used to whisper about back when we started dating, the kind who wanted private-school children and a beach house on Tybee and to live in the old part of Buckhead, two blocks down from his parents.

Or when we started dating, what if my history with men had been more like Betsy’s? Betsy on her rumspringa, pushing boundaries in a way I hadn’t ever needed to try. If I had, would he have kept seeing me, or would I have been a pleasant weekend?

Most of all, if I had ever gotten into trouble, like Lexie Pine in that last picture, would he believe that I’d caused it? Lexie’s body had been passed around, splayed out and stolen onto paper, shown to everyone she knew, shaming her. She’d said no, or tried, with her covered-over mouth. His actions had erased that no, and his choices had erased her future.

He was right in one particular. Our girls were safer than Lexie Pine had ever been. Trey, with his money and connections and powerful family, would destroy anyone who treated his daughters even a fraction so poorly. But he never extended that protection to Lexie, even though he owed it to her. He hadn’t then. He should have stopped when she wanted to stop. If he had, he would have seen Ansel. He could have gone ahead and punched him and taken the negatives then, skipping so many steps and saving Lexie’s future. Instead he’d chosen not to see. He was choosing not to see again, now. He really could not imagine his daughters in her place.