“Why don’t you tell me about your childhood,” Brent had said to her, and if he ever came back, maybe she would tell him. She would tell what had really happened with her family, and she would tell about the old man who’d once lived here, and how he keeps circling back like a lost cat wanting in, and how, now that she has had time to think about it, she hated those things Brent said to her—they weren’t funny at all—like that she’d be so easy to kill. She would say she thinks that was mean, and so was the way he sometimes stared at Harvey’s mouth and then at her, like it was her fault, when the doctor had been so kind and reassuring to say no one was to blame; besides, it could have been much worse, much more complicated. The nurse had told her it would not affect his speech, and she was right about that, and the scar in the center of his lip—what they call Cupid’s bow—will fade. We are doing fine, she would say. I take good care of us. She would say this and then repeat it; she would say it until she believed it herself.

Shelley remembers the case where the man said, “I’ll take care of you.” It was a crime of passion, and the arguments went round and round, the man testifying that he’d said those words in love, in his attempt to reassure his wife how much he loved her and wanted to take good care of her, but the prosecution seeing it as a threat—I’ll take care of you—the way it was spoken suggesting the man had a twisty villain mustache and a maniacal laugh. The weight fell on the word you, a threat more than a promise. I’ll take care of you—that is the line she hears the times she wakes to a sound that is unfamiliar, a shadow that races past her eyes, when what she wishes for is the comfort of laying her head down and closing her eyes and feeling someone really is there to take care of her, to love and watch over her.