She knew in the first instant that Mark was dead. She searched for the shooter, for any man on the east side of Main Street with a gun. She fired rapidly, moving efficiently from one to the next, putting a bullet in each one to hold him where he was until the twenty-round magazine was empty. She reloaded, aimed, and fired, but the energy of the attack had been exhausted.

The psychopaths and the desperate lifelong fighters and the suicidal fatalists had become scarce. The ones who had been content to take places in the main body of the throng, the ones who hoped to escape, were all starting to slip away to try it on their own. The ones who had stayed in the rear, far from the fight, were beginning to break and run away.

At the north end of Main, she saw colored light from the roof bars of the state police vehicles as they flashed past. Two of them closed off this block of Main, but the others kept coming, speeding to get ahead of the retreating prisoners.

As soon as the last of the prisoners had fallen back, she gathered the four intact police cars and drove slowly with them along Constitution Street, executing a sweep to be sure no stragglers stayed behind. When she and her officers reached the end of Constitution, she found that the state police had diverted the mob of escapees onto the baseball field, which was surrounded by high fences on all sides. At dawn they began the long process of transporting the prisoners back to their prison.

At the funeral, Mark Ballard’s casket was closed to keep his wife and others from seeing what the rifle shot had done to his head.

A week after the funeral, Marcia Ballard wrote a note to Leah Hawkins thanking her for being Mark’s beloved friend and saying that Leah had made his life a thousand times better. She had typed it on Mark’s computer, a task Leah knew had taken a huge effort for her. By then she could not have written a word by hand. After Leah had read the note a few times, pausing over the word “beloved,” she burned the paper. She knew she wouldn’t forget the words, and what the two women and the man had said to each other about their private life was not ever going to be anybody else’s business.