Worst of all, clean Lexie had a separate past, separate places, separate memories and comforts. He knew nothing of these, and he had no source he could tap to learn more. All his research so far, all his connections, only showed him a life she had abandoned.

His leads were ashes, and she might as well be air.

18

Trey was waiting for a reaction, but I didn’t have one. Not yet. I said, “I have to tell Marshall. Now. He needs to know all this. It could help him find Lexie.”

Suddenly Robert was in the room with us. His small, urgent heartbeat was so much bigger than this history.

“Of course,” Trey said, relieved, I thought, that I would handle this. That he wouldn’t have to say it all again. He didn’t object when I left the room to do it.

I needed time away from his questioning, anxious gaze, and more important, I didn’t know how to tell his own story in front of him. I might say something to Marshall that would reveal my faith or lack of it, before I knew how I felt. I went to Trey’s office.

Marshall’s phone sent me to voice mail, so I sat down at the desk and emailed him. It felt good to write the whole thing out. It took almost an hour, and that was good, too. Typing it, seeing the story unspool in black and white, made it feel a little truer. At the same time, it felt strange to be talking to another man, even Marshall, so intimately about my husband and his failings.

Every time I paused to think, my eyes were drawn to Trey’s own picture from his frat days, still sitting on the bookshelf. He was so young. In this shot no pledges were lined up on the lawn in front of him. Ansel/Adam had yet to rush. Lexie Pine had not crossed his path. She was probably unpacking her thrift-store jeans into her dorm’s dresser, nervously rechecking her class schedule, meeting her roommate.

In my head the roommate was a lot like Trey’s sister, a Vanderbilt grad who was cool and kind and distant with me. I even pictured them the same, blondes with bright, white, straightened smiles and too many shoes for a dorm closet. She would have a new bedspread and framed posters and a fancy coffeemaker and a mini-fridge. I added a pretty mother, much like my own mother-in-law, wearing one of her million lightweight silk sweater sets, helping her child arrange throw pillows and her old pink bear from home.

I was probably close. This was UVA in the nineties after all. What would this girl and her family have made of Lexie? She was not the roomie they’d expected.