All eyes turn to Dad, who’s scratching one of the psoriatic lesions beneath his shirtsleeve. Pinpoints of blood appear on the light blue cotton.

“There are four reasons that I have to take the stand,” he says with deliberation, as though about to go through a differential diagnosis for a medical student.

I groan, but that doesn’t stop him.

“One, the jury wants to hear me say I didn’t do it.”

“Will you say that?” I ask him. “That’s not what you told me at the Pollock prison.”

His eyes look almost steely. “I’ll say it.”

But will you mean it? I ask silently.

“Two,” he goes on, “Quentin promised in his opening statement that I would testify.”

I glare at Quentin, who gives Dad a look that says, Promises are made to be broken. “You don’t have to do that, Tom, given what’s happened.”

“Forget what just happened. You told the jury I would get up there, and if I don’t, they’re going to think I’m hiding something. You’ve based your whole defense on my character and forthrightness. And a man with good character isn’t afraid to take the stand in his own defense.”

“A valid point,” Rusty concedes.

“So relieved you think so,” I mutter.

“Third, the truths that lie behind my relationship with Viola impact a lot of people, and they’ve been buried for too long. Remember my eulogy for Henry Sexton? I called on people to break their silence, no matter the cost. It’s like Reverend Baldwin coming forward with Albert’s ledgers after forty years. That’s what we need.”

This kind of thinking is what Mom is afraid of. “Reverend Baldwin didn’t publish the contents of those ledgers in the paper. He gave us copies of a couple of pages. A courtroom is no place to confess your sins, Dad. Not under oath. Write a book, if you want to wash your soul clean.”

He looks at the floor and shakes his head with mulish resolve. “I can’t do that. I owe it to Viola—and to Jimmy and Luther and all the others—to tell what I know. I owe it to Henry, and I owe it to Caitlin, too.”

I get up and walk over to the sofa, crouching before him. “Caitlin wouldn’t want you to risk going to jail out of some misguided sense of duty to reveal the past.”

His eyes meet mine with unsettling fervor. “Caitlin died trying to uncover the past. Not to save me, or to win glory for herself. She wanted to know what happened to Jimmy Revels. And she was right to want to know. This poison has been tainting this area for too long. It’s time to lance the abscess once and for all.”