I read my email over twice before I hit send, making sure the story I’d laid out for Marshall was as close as I could come to re-creating Trey’s. I was glad to see I hadn’t wasted lines defending my husband or making excuses for him. I was equally relieved to see I hadn’t typed “Trey said” or, worse, “According to Trey” too many times. I’d written it plain, as if I believed it. That must mean I did. I hoped I did.

Growing up the way I had, both the story and the way he’d described Lexie, her behavior at that posh university, made sense to me. She must have felt how I had when I visited the UGA campus over in Athens. My scholarship would have paid my tuition at any in-state school that accepted me, and UGA had the most prestigious theatre program. I’d gone for a campus tour that included a dorm stay and a student guide.

They’d paired me with a sorority girl who drove me around campus in her brand-new VW Bug convertible. She had a Lowcountry accent and perfect teeth, and she assumed I’d rather go with her to a local Italian place than eat the free sandwiches at the meet-and-greet.

I ordered a side salad and water and white-knuckled it, my hand in my purse, fisted around Betsy’s invisible, no-limit Visa, giving the rich girl her own accent and inflections back. It was pure performance, and she bought it enough to push me to rush, swearing I was sure to get a bid. The whole thing left me exhausted. I’d chosen Georgia State, grittier and grungier and smaller. Betsy’s first choice, too. UVA was upscale and elite. I understood, in ways my husband at twenty-one years old could not have, how this one event could ruin a girl like Lexie. She’d had no safety net, no backup opportunities. It was awful what had happened to her, and my husband’s part in it wasn’t pretty.

But it also did not make him Spencer Shaw.

I hoped Marshall would agree. He knew Trey pretty well from work, plus they’d been thrown together quite a bit socially back when Betsy was alive. But Marshall had a cop mind, naturally suspicious. I wondered if he would ask the same question that was plaguing me.

Why had Trey never told me this, not any of it, before?

Perhaps he’d hinted at it.

“I was such an ass in college,” he’d said more than once, shaking his head. Rueful, but also, I thought, fond.