Lucy was waiting for me in the living room, in a very worn pair of yoga leggings and her second-favorite school mascot sweatshirt, celebrating the Homerville Bears with a picture of a bear that I swear is a panda (not a bear), but no one asks me about these things. She looked. . .tired. Her hair was down and not sprayed up into a helmet. Which was interesting.

“Where’s Millie?” I asked.

“Millie thought we should talk,” Lucy said. “Alone.”

“Okay.” I dumped my bag. “You mean about the play? Mr. Davidson told me you thought it was okay. Right?”

“Yes.” Lucy shook her head. “I mean, no.”

I froze. “I’m confused.”

“No, I just wanted to say—” Lucy stepped forward. “I just wanted to say I’m so sorry, Anne. I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you. I knew you didn’t do anything to the Spencer yard, but I didn’t tell you that. I should have and I’m very very sorry. It’s just with everything happening, I got so caught up with being worried about the you who is my daughter at Greenville and all that’s going on that I forgot about. . .you.”

Looking at her, in her own skin, a rare occasion, I realized that while I spent a week in a white T-shirt trying to fit in, Lucy had spent every day since she’d arrived in Greenville in a crisp green prison suit, trying to get Greenville to treat her like anyone else doing her job.

“So, I’m very sorry.”

“Thank you,” I blurted out. “And I’m sorry I told you, you know, ‘fuck you.’ ”

“Thank you.” Lucy let out a long slow breath. “I knew this was going to be hard, I knew Greenville was going to be hard.”

“Medium hard,” I joked halfheartedly. “Standard hard.”

“Really hard,” Lucy added. “I know you handle yourself so well with all this stuff—mostly. We’ve been so many places and you adapt, you’re much better at this than me when I was your age. I think sometimes I forget that it’s a big thing to ask a teenager to handle herself well when it seems like everyone’s against you—like everyone wants you to break. I forget that as much as I know what it’s like to be on the outside, I don’t know what it’s like for you to be on the outside. I don’t know what it’s like to be the only person who looks like you in a whole town. I mean, I know but I don’t know. And I should have talked to you about it more, and I’m sorry.”

A lump swelled in my throat. “I mean. . .they wanted to see us both fail, right? Maybe for reasons that were different but kind of similar? I don’t know.”