But I wasn’t supposed to. I wasn’t allowed to, unless my lawyer gave me specific permission. And what if I’m remembering wrong? I asked myself, desperate. Desperate and silent. What if the detective had put those memories in my head by telling me about Tig’s accusation? It was Tig’s car, after all. I didn’t even really have a license. He had to have been driving.

Maybe after I turned the key in the ignition, Tig slid in behind me and I scooted down the bench seat to the passenger side. Maybe we changed seats sometime later, in an unremembered pit stop. Surely if I’d been driving, the police would know. They would figure it out. I told myself all this, picturing scenes like I’d seen in movies. Teams of cops and scientists and doctors, seeking truth. I didn’t understand that a sleepy, midsize college town in 1991 didn’t have those resources.

The relevant truths were few and already written down: It was Tig’s car. He was a kid from Downtown, while I lived in Waverly Place, backed by parents who regularly dined with the mayor. I had one of the best criminal attorneys in the state standing between me and every question that might have revealed the truth. The only person who cared enough about Tig’s statement to check on it was this cop. But he was no match for Mitch and all my parents’ money. I didn’t even have to lie. Not out loud. All I had to do was sit quiet and let all the wrong things happen.

After the detective left, and my lawyer left, and my father went back to work, my mother made us lunch. We sat in the dining room, each of us in front of our own untouched salad. I was never comfortable in this formal room with its lacquered table and wall-length china cabinet displaying all her Raynaud dishes. It was painted a weird neutral, taupe and beige mated to make a putty-colored baby. River Stone, my mother called this color, though I’d enraged her once by calling it Hint of Wart.

She was still so tense she was vibrating like a violin string, every bit of her pulled taut.

“I think . . .” I started, and then stopped. I had said nothing to the cop, but I needed to tell someone. “I think I may have been . . .”

I stared at her, and she stared back, searching my face with a depth I was not used to. She never looked at me the way she looked at Connor. She gazed at his face with the only kind of hunger that she ever seemed to feel. Now she was looking into my eyes, but it was different. It was as if she were seeking confirmation or perhaps the truth.

Whatever she was looking for, she found it.

“Jesus,” she said. “You were . . .” She couldn’t bear to finish the sentence any more than I could.

“I really don’t remember,” I said instantly. Now I was lying, so I amended it. I tried to make it be true. “I don’t remember driving.”

“You don’t remember driving?” my mother repeated, questioning but also nodding.

“I don’t,” I said. “But Tig said I was, and I do remember that I had the k—”

“You don’t remember driving,” my mother said, fast and edgy, and this time it was an order. She reached a hand across the table and left it there until I gave her mine. It struck me that this, today, was the most my mother had touched my body in weeks. I could not remember the last time her hand had rested on my leg or squeezed my fingers. “Don’t let this boy put things in your head. If you try to remember too hard, your brain can make things up. Like all those kids who said the satanists were at the day care, or whatever that was. None of it happened. And if you had been driving, the police would know. So you weren’t.”

We sat for a moment, and I said, “What if memories come back, like that detective said?”

My mother shook her head. “Any new thing you think you remember, you can’t trust that. That policeman put it in your head. So let it go. You aren’t going to talk about it. With anyone. Ever again. This isn’t just about you, Amy. If you invent some big confession, you could hurt your dad’s career, and I am already feeling so judged. And your brother—he has a very bright future. You have embarrassed us enough.”

“But if Tig wasn’t dri—” I started, and she jerked her hand away. Her voice went from almost pleading to chilly and dismissive.

“Amy, don’t get dramatic and choose martyrdom. Do not orchestrate some grand romantic gesture for this boy. Because that would be pathetic. You are hardly Juliet.” And now her gaze did go to my body. “Do you understand me?”

I did. I understood her perfectly.

And God help me, I did what she said. I swallowed it down and let it sit inside me. It filled me, like a lump of clay in my stomach.

Part of me believed that it would fix itself without me. Surely I had behaved suspiciously enough that that old, dadlike detective would tell someone, We got it wrong. I see now! It was Amy at the wheel.

Then I could say, That may be so, but I do not remember, and let justice happen.

But no one ever talked to me about it again. Not the police, not my lawyer, not my family. Tig took a deal, pleading guilty for a reduced sentence, and no one even told me that. I saw it in the News Journal. I had no way to know where he was sent or what happened to him there. I had no contact information, no shared friend, and I was too ashamed to call his mother or his ex-stepdad. My father took a job in Boston, and we moved away.

For the next three years, the length of Tig’s sentence, I couldn’t eat. Food had long been my comfort, and I did not deserve to be comforted. I wanted the hunger. It was an angry, alive thing that I let loose inside myself as punishment.

I thinned and dwindled, and though I was wan and weak, my skin a little loose on my young frame, I finally looked like a daughter that my mother might have wanted. But what I had done could not be shed, and her gaze still slid toward me and away, glancing off air, never quite landing on me, as if my edges were still two feet farther out than my surfaces. Shame had applied itself onto my bones, swelling around me until I was mired, and, to her, fat and shame were almost the same thing.

We never got much better. These days my relationship with my family was a lukewarm phone call close to Christmas or my birthday, in which we traded empty words about getting together sometime.

Now I had made my own family, and we weren’t like that. I let Maddy be her mercurial, brash self, and Oliver was growing up secure and adored. With me Davis had felt safe enough to whisper that he’d wanted his wife gone, not fixed, even though her absence hurt his kid down to her small bones. I had made our home into a place full of love and acceptance, but I had locked myself outside it.

I never did whisper my worst thing in the dark to Davis. I kept the lights out when we made love, so he wouldn’t see the stretch marks on my body; I never told him about the night that Mrs. Shipley died, much less that moment, mid-interrogation, when I’d remembered sliding in behind the wheel.

This was why Roux’s game had gotten to me. It wasn’t the gin, or the force of her personality. In that moment, in my basement, I’d felt that she saw me, fully, all the way down to the bottom. She’d looked into me as if she knew what I was capable of doing and sustaining. It had horrified me, and yet a piece of me had liked it. A piece of me had wanted to drink more gin, lift my shirt to show her the faint white marks on my breasts and belly, let the truth be in the room with us. Isn’t that what diving gave me? To float in the same space as the truth, silent and unafraid.

I knew from long experience that I only had to wait the feeling out. People say, I don’t know how she lives with herself, but every single one of them was living with their own worst thing, just fine. No one walks around holding their ugliest sin in the palm of their hand, staring at it. Our hurts are heavy, and we let them sink. Every day they drift lower, settling in murky places where the light can’t reach. All I had to do was wait. My bad would fall down into darkness again, because the bad things always do.

All I had to do was make blondies. Update the neighborhood directory. Call Divers Down and get back on the teaching schedule. Feed the baby. All I had to do was all my jobs, and let time pass.

Today my job was Madison.

I needed to talk serious with her about boys and cars and lying by omission. My jangled nerves demanded that I hand down groundings and extra chores, too, but I wasn’t going to do that. Maddy wasn’t me, and Luca wasn’t Tig Simms. They’d stolen a two-mile ride in a cool car, dead sober, in the sunshiny morning. This was normal teen behavior, and I would react to it as such, not to my own past.

I was in the keeping room playing peekaboo with Oliver when I finally heard the front door open and Maddy’s stompy walk ringing out against the hardwoods.

“I’m home!” she hollered.

“Back here,” I called. “Come see me.”

I stood up, Oliver cocked on my hip, but when she came through the swinging door, she had Luca with her. This I did not expect. Oliver bounced himself joyfully, smiling his silly, two-tooth smile at the sight of her. He was crazy about Maddy.

“You remember Luca?” she said, coming all the way to me to give Oliver a little tickle on his belly. “Hi, stinky baby.” Her cheeks were pink with pleasure.