The man is getting restless, watching the clock, whispering again to his lawyer. It’s like he’s pissed off he’s having to wait, like maybe he would have preferred to keep lounging in his cell instead. There is a low murmur of voices through the courtroom, and the tension is high. It feels a little like when Shelley went to see Madonna in concert that time.

Why didn’t he just leave his wife and then date others? Then he could just break up, not murder them. Brent would call her naïve; he once told her that people like games. People like secrets. He paused then and asked, “Do you have secrets, Shelley?”

But instead of answering that, she did a whole routine she had thought up about a commercial on television—a drug for men, but what they show is a woman half his age lounging on the bed in something skimpy. We are led to believe the man has testosterone to spare but, uh-oh, he does sometimes need a little help from his friends at the pharmaceutical company, while the camera stays focused on the young woman as she slinks around the room in the same way the cheese does. Don’t deny your passion—that’s the focus, passion, as she stretches out on the bed like a cat and waits for the man in the bathroom, who must be waiting for things to happen. But then if you listen very carefully, you will hear the fast, low-volume murmuring of truth: “If you have shortness of breath or severe abdominal cramping or diarrhea, if you experience sudden blindness and loss of memory, if you have an erection that is painful and lasts over seven hours and you find it impossible to urinate, if you are vomiting and having life-threatening seizures, you may want to see your doctor.” Read the fine print!

Once, when Brent found where Jason had written SHIT on the outside of the garage door, he made a joke over dinner, saying, “Well, the writing is on the wall.” They all laughed, but when he asked a second time who did it and Jason still didn’t respond, Brent got angry and made him get out there with Clorox and wash that door that had not been washed in a hundred years, but Jason had used a Sharpie, and when they left, it was still there—SHIT—faded but there. “Maybe your old man wouldn’t give a shit about lying, but I do,” Brent said, but Shelley told Jason how his father was one of the most truthful people she had ever known. “He was a hero,” she said. “He was handsome and smart and kind and considerate, and he was a hero both in the marines and in life.”