“How old are they?” I’m curious about Kenny. I’ve shared my deepest secrets, as if he were my therapist, not my lawyer, and I know so little about him. He hands me the photo from his desk and I see two young men who look a lot like Axl and Simon: white, healthy, polo-shirted. I recognize our country club in the background. I wonder if we’ve ever been there at the same time—maybe the Fourth of July barbecue or the Easter egg roll. I wonder if when this is all over, or when I return to my old life, I will see Kenny there, drinking a martini, his tall, healthy, smart Penn boys besides him.

“Twenty-two and twenty-four. And until your case, I hadn’t really thought about all the ways my kids had a leg up. That’s not to say I’m not proud of them—I am, very—but I paid for counselors and tutors and summer programs and camps and club soccer and private school, and they’re legacies, of course, on both sides actually.” He points to two degrees on the wall from the University of Pennsylvania, one from the college of arts and sciences and the other from the law school. “I didn’t buy a building, probably because I couldn’t afford one, but I bought into the system. I still do. Every day. And lately I don’t know what I think about that.”

“Yeah,” I say, and feel tears well up in my eyes.

“I like you, Chloe. And I hope maybe one day you find your way into college on your own. In the meantime, I hope you take a minute to think about the Latin capers, ‘to seize, grasp, take.’ Remember, knowledge is power. An important part of growing up is letting yourself see the world around you as it truly is, even if you don’t like what you see or your own complicity in it.”

“You’re talking about knowing without knowing,” I say, because I am not one of Kenny’s kids; I’m a mediocre student who likes to have things spelled out.

“Yep. Though our crimes are different—and to be clear, I mean crimes in a moral sense, not a legal one, of course—we both have a lot of thinking to do,” Kenny says. “We’ve both been aggressively oblivious, as you so eloquently put it.”

A giggle bubbles up in the back of my throat. I wish I could call Shola. She’d find it hilarious that my mom’s felonies have had the unintended consequence of making my lawyer woke.

On second thought, maybe she wouldn’t find it funny at all. Maybe she’d wonder why it’s taken us all so long to open our eyes.

Again, she’s three steps ahead of me. She knows the answer to that too.

To be fair, so do I.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Now