“Your mother said things that, well, later would sound incriminating. I had to ask her to leave. A few weeks later Nick was killed and I testified. My testimony only dealt with that one argument. The prosecutors, as they do, helped the jury draw conclusions from that.”

“Tell me,” I hiss, “did Jenna say nothing to provoke my mother?”

“Jenna was definitely provocative.”

“And yet somehow that didn’t make it into your testimony.”

“True,” Lander admits with a sigh. “My father, who was following the case much more closely than I was, was convinced that your mother was guilty. He’s the one who urged me to tell the police about the argument after the murder took place. And he also insisted that I be careful not to disparage Jenna while relaying the tale. He felt that Jenna had been through enough. That she had just lost her husband. That she was only saying what any scorned woman would say. And, although you may not want to hear this, your mother hurt her. She slept with her husband—Jenna was a victim. She was innocent of everything. I now believe that your mother was also innocent of some things. But not of everything.”

I hate that he’s right. Even now I know there was no excuse for my mother’s behavior. And to make matters worse, she took Edmund Gable’s advice; she waged an open war against Nick’s wife. She made herself look crazy and, in retrospect, dangerous. It made setting her up so easy.

“ ‘We silenced Nick Foley,’ ” I say, my voice low and angry. “That’s what you wrote. You didn’t write that my mother silenced him. You didn’t write that your father silenced him. You used the word ‘we’ and then you put it in your little notebook and tucked it away in a drawer, hiding it from anyone who might find that statement troubling. And you’ve known who I am for God only knows how long—and rather than confront me, you played me. And now, now, you want me to believe that you had nothing to do with setting my mother up? That all you did was tell the truth as you knew it and that you just sort of stumbled into this thing blindly. That none of this is your fault. That—”

“We did silence Nick Foley,” Lander interrupts, his eyes cold. “And yes, I did stumble into it blindly, though that doesn’t mean that I didn’t have the opportunity to see things clearly. I just wasn’t paying attention. I was focused on my own mother, trying to please my father so that he would get her the care she needed.”

“Oh right, your mother,” I say, pretending to think about that. “That would be the woman who died alone because you went off to Oxford and couldn’t be bothered with her, right? Is that the mother we’re talking about?”