“Tell me you’re not serious,” Claudia cried, her eyes blazing with fury as she rounded on Dan. “Is that what this evening is about? You got us here on the pretense of a friendly dinner and all the time . . .” She clasped her hands to her head in raging disbelief. “I can’t believe you’d do this. Don’t you think we’ve been through enough? Look at her, that’s what that animal did to my mother and yet you seem to think it’s all right to talk to him about it, to get him to write her letters as if he’s some kind of . . . fucking pen pal . . .”

“Claudia,” Andee said softly.

“Don’t touch me,” Claudia growled, snatching her arm away from Andee’s soothing hand. “We, me and my family, are not your project, do you understand that? We don’t want you interfering in our lives, because you clearly don’t understand the first thing about what’s happened to us if this is what you’re going to do. All you apparently care about is some vile human being who goes around setting fire to people’s houses and almost killing them. No one made him do it. You do realize that, don’t you? He could have said no, walked away, done the right thing, but he didn’t. Apparently he even watched us coming and going like a bloody stalker deciding on the best time to strike, and please don’t tell me that proves he didn’t want to hurt anyone, because it’s too late for that. He’s where he deserves to be, where I hope he’ll stay for the rest of his rotten life, and if you think either of us is going to read his bloody letters, much less ever forgive him, you’re out of your minds.”

Casting a glance at Dan, Andee said, “Claudia, I understand how you feel, really I do . . .”

“No, you don’t. If you did you wouldn’t have done this. Listen to me, we want nothing to do with that monster, and I can’t believe you ever thought we would. Haven’t you seen how hard we’ve been trying to put our lives back together, to move on from it and try to forget it ever happened? Except we’ll never be able to do that, will we? One of us will bear the scars forever, in our own ways we all will, and now you seem to think that adding this to our pain is a good idea. Just what kind of people are you? We thought you were our friends, we trusted you, and yet all the time you’ve been using us as . . . experiments, pawns, seeing if you can fix us with one of your do-gooder schemes. How dare you? How could you even have thought we’d want to be involved in this?”