My eyes go wet as I go deeper into the vortex of a murder arrest. Oddly, though, I’m not ashamed of my emotions. The tears come, and I let them. I am being sucked downward. I am helpless. I have no control over what’s happening. My vision is blurred, but I can see Kristen clearly enough to see she’s moving her mouth and saying that everything will be all right. Somehow her emotions don’t track with her words. It’s like an old Japanese movie dubbed in English. Just not quite right. I wonder then if she’s thinking back to Hood Canal. I wonder then if she’s looking at me in a way that she never has.

When she first met me, she saw me as broken but deep down, like the fixer upper on our street, good bones.

“You got this wrong,” Kristen calls out to the detectives. “Not my Connor. He’d never hurt a fly.”

As they slide me into the backseat of their car, I catch another fleeting glimpse of her beautiful face.

I wonder if she sees me as guilty.

I wonder if that’s what I am.

Hours pass before I see Kristen. I’ve been strip-searched, fingerprinted, and photographed in the Mason County jail by a couple of deputies who glower at me like I’m subhuman. In the holding cell, another man asked me if he could suck my cock when the guard is out of view. I declined. I sit motionless on a bench as a fruit fly circles overhead. I don’t swat at it because it is superior to me. As good as I’ve tried to be in my life, I know that I have been a fraud. I cheated on my wife. I cheated with Sophie Warner. It was a deliberate act. I can’t make it into anything less. I could rationalize all I want, but God knows what I’ve done. God knows that I have been a fraud to a woman who adores me—a woman who wants nothing more than to make a family with me.

I slept with Sophie. Yet it was far more than that. I fell in love too. We both did.

Kristen is in the jail’s small visiting room when they bring me to her. I know she must have taken her time to follow me here, because she is no longer dressed for work. She wears no makeup, and her hair is clipped back—her look for days when she doesn’t have the time or the desire to wash and style it. Mostly Saturdays. But this isn’t a Saturday. I don’t know why I thought that she was just outside the jail the whole time, telling the police that I was innocent.

I take the chair across the table from her. The guard shuts the door.

“I’m sorry about all of this,” I say.