“I’m sorry,” I say, barely looking up from my work. “I’m not okay, Marcy.”

I can feel myself starting to crumble. I’m grateful that the door is shut and that Marcy is the one who is going to catch me when I fall instead of someone who would see opportunity in what I am about to say.

She leans closer over the desk. I can smell her perfume. Heavy on the gardenia. A touch of spice.

“What is it, Kristen?” Her eyes are full of concern.

Genuine concern, I think. Though I admit that I use that same look in a courtroom, and it is almost always far from a genuine representation of what I am really thinking about my client and what he’s done.

My eyes puddle.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say.

“Something’s going on,” she says, now coming to my side of the desk. She puts her hand on my shoulder. “Is it about starting your family?”

She goes there right away. Fecund women do this. If you’ve struggled to conceive and stupidly mentioned what you have been going through, then no matter what is going on, that drags you down. The source of your pain is always about the baby.

The one you don’t have.

The one you will never have.

The one they already have.

“No,” I finally say. “I’m just scared, Marcy.”

“Scared about what?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“You can,” Marcy says. “You clearly need to. Whatever it is, it’s tearing you apart.”

I gently push her away and turn to the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Puget Sound. I know she’ll see what’s on my screen and ask me about it.

“That case isn’t solved yet?” she says, seeing the Seattle Times story on the murder of the young mother on Hood Canal. “Must have been traumatic. Being there when something so terrible occurred.”

Marcy’s predictable all right.

I watch the rolling white clouds as they bump into each other over the blue-gray waters of the sound.

“Marcy,” I say. “I’m worried . . . and I’m scared.”

“Jesus, Kristen, now you’re scaring me. What is it?”

I turn slowly to face her. “I’m not even sure how to say this but . . .”

“But what? Say what?”

In the courtroom, according to the old-timers’ joke, this is a Perry Mason moment, the scene in which the bombshell is dropped to a cacophony of gasps from the jury box.

“I’m scared that Connor was involved in what happened.”

There is a gasp. Only one. From Marcy.

Her eyes widen. “What do you mean?”

I tell her about the blood on the sheets. The sand on the soles of Connor’s shoes. How he couldn’t really account for his time from the moment that we arrived until the police came. How I never saw him after we got to the cabin.