I sat back, hoping I was in a dream. I’d wake up soon. She wasn’t telling me what I had hoped to hear.

We were on the screened front porch of her small Queen Anne home. I had been lucky to catch her there. She was on a night schedule for an elderly lady, Mrs. Louella Woodhouse, whose son was a church deacon. She looked at me with a mixed expression of pity and anger and disappointment.

“It wasn’t something I intended to happen,” I said dryly, like someone who had just been struck in the face by a gust of heavy, wet wind. “I didn’t forget most of what you told me. It wasn’t because of remembering all that this morning that I came over here.”

Her eyes widened. She was wearing a light-green cotton bathrobe. She had just finished washing her hair and was still wiping it dry when I had cycled up to her house and knocked on the door. She had paused, surprised to see me, and after taking a closer look at my face, had suggested we both sit. Maybe because she was a nurse, she could feel the way my very bones were vibrating.

“Are you saying you were raped?”

“I don’t know if I’d put it that way,” I replied. “I was offered too much of a unique lemon alcohol drink made in Italy, and I didn’t realize how it would affect me. I drank too much of it.”

“So someone took advantage of you when you were inebriated?”

Now that this had happened, was I prepared to cast all the dark, black sheet of blame over Garland Foxworth?

“Maybe,” I said.

“I don’t understand. How can that be maybe? There are no maybes or almosts when it comes to this.”

I looked away. The tears felt like they were freezing over my eyes and I was looking at the world through snow. Garland’s smile faded in and out. Somewhere on the street, little girls were laughing, and for a moment, I longed to be a child again, free to do anything that didn’t make me or my clothes dirty as long as I was where my mother knew I’d be. But I was never an angel, I thought, even then.

“I’m not entirely without fault,” I said in a voice barely above a whisper. “I went to Charlottesville deliberately to see him and used visiting a great-aunt as an excuse. When I was there, I willingly went to his home without any chaperone or anyone knowing. My great-aunt and her servant are too old to realize anything. The gentleman didn’t force me to drink. I did willingly take it.”

“More than one?”

“Yes, and then everything just seemed to happen so fast. I didn’t offer any real resistance.”

Nurse Rose sat back, the right corner of her mouth tucked in as she thought about what I had just said. “Willingly didn’t offer any? Are you saying you led this young man into believing this was all right, that you wanted it to happen?”