“I am,” I said simply, meeting his eye. He looked away.

“His grades aren’t very high,” a woman behind me was saying. “I’m worried about him dragging her down.”

“Anyone,” a man replied, “is going to drag her down.”

A television in the corner was running a news story about the LeRoi woman’s daughter. The sound was turned off, but I watched the closed captioning. LeRoi wasn’t lying, as it turned out: the girl’s mother saw the news report and made contact. The two adult women met, on camera, both crying, both carrying flowers. They sat together awkwardly on a sofa and the mother explained that she had been trying to keep the daughter safe; she knew it would be dangerous to try to leave LeRoi. She said she tried to look for the daughter later, but to no avail, until she saw her on TV. She handed the daughter her birth certificate.

The way the mother carried herself was wrong somehow, though I couldn’t pinpoint it. Her tears seemed fake; she was too pulled together. Shouldn’t she just be absolutely breaking down? As I watched, I developed a theory that she’d never wanted to see the daughter again, not really. She’d left her intentionally, and not because of any danger, though it did give her a convenient excuse. She hadn’t looked for her, hadn’t wanted to revisit any part of her life with LeRoi, but when she saw her daughter’s pathetic face crying on TV, when she knew friends would’ve seen it too, she was left with no option but to come forward.

I stared at that image, thinking, Why did she go with him in the first place? She must have been weak in some way. LeRoi must have sniffed out that weakness. He must have seen that for this woman, life was nothing more than trying to soak up anything pleasurable all at once, as fast as she could. If he gave her parties, drugs, sex, he could do whatever he wanted.