Lakshmi threw a hand up. “Second week of school, I told her she’d look great in a skirt. The girl dressed like the Amish. She needed all the encouragement she could get. A month later, she comes home, walks in on me having ‘personal’ time. She filed a report about me showing her my fanny, all because I thought she’d be gone for another hour. The poor girl didn’t know the difference between her urethra and her vagina. Masturbation might as well have been sodomy.”

Like the reasoning behind Lakshmi’s restraining order, the answer sounded believable, but Caitlin had more. “Tell me about Pratima Siddal.”

Lakshmi’s voice dropped. “Those documents were supposed to be sealed.”

Caitlin crossed her arms. “You attended a public high school before you went to Hackley. Did you have a relationship with a teacher named Pratima Siddal?”

Lakshmi met Caitlin’s posture and came back angry, her voice doubled in volume. “Sounds like you know what I had with Mrs. Siddal, Caitlin. I want to know how the sealed record of a juvenile victim of sexual assault got in your hands.”

“The feds profiled you, Lakshmi.” Caitlin quoted a line from the FBI’s report. “ ‘From a young age, Anjale has exhibited tendencies toward obsession with female love interests.’ They say you stalked Chapman, that you harassed Ruth Davis, that you cost Pratima Siddal her job and her marriage.”

“I cost Pratima her job?” Lakshmi threw her head back, then returned with fire in her eyes. “I was a fifteen-year-old who’d never been kissed, and she was the twenty-four-year-old grammar teacher who coached the girls’ soccer team, and the only other woman of Indian descent within twenty miles. Did I have a crush on her? Yes. Did I lose my virginity with her? Yes. Did I start it? No bloody way.”

She ran a finger under an eye, pushed back a tear. “I was fifteen. I’d never smiled so much in my life, so I called her, way too many times, even waited outside her house to try to talk to her. That’s what teenagers do. Her husband called the police, my dad got involved, the next thing I knew, they arrested Pratima for statutory rape and my father shipped me off to private school. That record is supposed to be sealed.”

“It is,” Caitlin said. “Your father shared the story with the detectives.”

“Fuck my father.” The girl’s voice trembled. “I mishandled my time with Pratima, and for that, I’ll always be sorry. But I didn’t stalk her or Jesus Ruth or Angela.”

Caitlin let Lakshmi’s words hang in the air. “But you did drug her.”

Again, Lakshmi’s mouth dropped open. “What? Who did I drug?”

Caitlin pointed a finger at the girl’s chest. “The night Angela went out with Kieran and Dave. You told me you got high.”

“Yes, we got high. I told you that.”