“Oh . . . oh, yes. That’s right.”

I see pain rush in like a dark tide as her short-term memory returns to her. “Oh, Penn,” she says, her voice freighted with grief. “Why did he do it? After all that . . . why did Tom plead guilty?”

I take a deep breath before answering, and then I find that words fail me.

“Is it too late to change the plea?” she asks.

“Yes. Quentin bargained it down to a lesser charge, but—”

“But Tom still has to go to prison.”

I nod. “Three years.”

“Oh, God.” She pulls the sheet up to her neck with one hand clenched like a claw. “He’s going to die there.”

“I’m going to do everything humanly possible to get him out. But right now we need to focus on you.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter.”

“It matters, Mom. It matters to Annie. It matters to Jenny. It matters to me. And most of all, it matters to Dad.”

This time she doesn’t respond. She just lies there with tears leaking from her eyes, and she makes no effort to wipe them away. How hard do we work to blind ourselves to things we don’t want to see? I wonder. Even if they’re right in front of us?

Mom lied to me the day after Dad jumped bail—about not being in contact with him—but when she admitted it to me, I wrote off the anomaly as loyalty to her husband. How many lies have the two of them told to protect each other? Or to protect us, their children?

“Mom,” I say, reaching out and gently squeezing her shoulder, “I need to ask you something. Did you go to Cora Revels’s house the night Viola died?”

She doesn’t answer, but her eyes focus on me, and the muscles in her face almost shiver in their struggle to convey incredulity, denial, indignation, anger, and finally . . . relief.

“How did you find out?” she whispers.

“Jenny told me she called your house several times that morning, and you never answered.”

“Well, that’s not—”

“Mom, don’t.”

She takes a deep breath, then wipes her eyes and exhales very slowly.

“Dad lied on the stand, didn’t he? To protect you.”

“What is it you want to know, Penn?”

“What happened in Cora’s house that night.”

My mother’s mouth tightens into a line, and her eyes flick around the room. “What’s the use? Viola’s gone, and your father’s going to Parchman. Nothing’s going to change that, is it?”

“I need to know the truth. It’s time. Ya’ll kept it from me till now, and look how things have turned out. If I’m going to help Dad, I have to know what happened to Viola.”