“Look, I get it,” Benton is saying. “I’m not nearly as much fun as Marino. He’s already taken Desi fishing, started teaching him about guns, given him his first sip of beer.”

“Fishing is one thing but I’m not happy if Lucy and Janet think the rest of it is okay.”

“The point is—”

“The point is that you don’t need to be fun the same way Marino is,” I reply. “In fact I’m hoping you might be a good example.”

“Of what? A boring adult?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of a sexy brilliant federal agent who drives fast cars and wears designer clothes. Desi just doesn’t know you yet.”

“Apparently Desi does know me. Marino told him I’m a retired school principal, and Desi asked me about it. I told him it was a hundred years ago when I was just out of college and working on my master’s degree,” Benton says.

“Did you explain that when you were getting started, a lot of FBI agents came from educational and legal backgrounds? That in other words yours was simply a sensible career path?” Even as I say it I’m aware that it’s too much explanation, and the well has been poisoned.

“There was no reason for Marino to bring that up except to make Desi afraid of me. Which is harmful and ill-advised because he’s headstrong enough already. I’ve noticed that increasingly he doesn’t like being told what to do.”

“I agree he doesn’t like to be controlled. But then most of us don’t.”

“Marino’s goal is to be Good Time Uncle Pete while I’m the school principal,” Benton says, and I watch the darkness settle heavily, hotly.

We’ve reached the wide brick patio arranged with wooden tables, red umbrellas, and potted shrubs and flower beds. On this last Wednesday of September, there shouldn’t be an empty chair out here. But there’s no one sitting outside the Faculty Club, no one in the world but us.

CHAPTER 5

THE ENTRANCE COULD BELONG to a private home, and that’s what the Faculty Club has become to my FBI-profiler husband, who didn’t graduate from Harvard. Benton went to Amherst just like his father and grandfather did.

A home away from home. A portal to another place where pain, fear and tragedy aren’t allowed. Benton can spirit himself away to his immaculate neo-Georgian escape in the heart of the campus and pretend for a brief spell that there’s no such thing as ignorance, bigotry, politics, and small-minded bureaucrats.