Bree was looking deliberately away, her arms loosely around her swaddled son. “It’s in the letter. When Lexie left school and went running off to Memphis, she stopped all contact with her mother. Coral got worried, and she did the things any mother would do. She called the roommate and the dean’s office. When she learned that Lexie hadn’t been going to class and some of her things were gone from her room, she went straight to UVA, demanding to meet with someone in administration. They had a couple of the pictures by then. They showed her. The man who sat down with her made it clear that Lexie wasn’t welcome back. Coral stayed in Virginia, though, looking for her kid. She also tried to collect the pictures. She couldn’t stand the thought of them, her daughter’s body trapped on paper, being passed around forever. She tracked down as many copies as she could, shaming or threatening or begging kids all over campus. There were complaints, of course. Security started watching for her. Eventually they called the real police, who told her they would arrest her if she came back. She wrote it all down for me.”

He didn’t read the letter, though. Instead, as she spoke, he sorted the pictures. There were only five shots, multiple copies of each. He understood what was troubling Bree almost at once.

Four he could dismiss. They were only raw, ugly pornography, graphic and unkind. In all of them, Lexie Pine’s face was visible, but peripheral. The person holding the camera had had little interest in her face. The two young men in the shots, always headless or with their backs to the camera, swarmed her slight body, using it and filling it. Her expressions in the first four, from what he could see . . . well. She was having sex. Her face twisted into unflattering shapes that might be pleasure or pain or simply bad angles.

The fifth photograph was different. Significantly different.

There were three copies. He picked up the least damaged, studying it closer. He looked to Bree. She shrugged, tears leaking from her swollen eyes again.

The shot had been taken over one of the participating boys’ shoulders, so his body obscured Lexie’s below the waist. Lexie was on her back, her arms over her head to show the vulnerable hollows of her armpits, shoulders crunched up. Her small breasts were centered in the shot, lifted by her stretched, taut arms. The other young man was barely in the photo at all. Only the ends of his knees appeared, framing the crown of her head. Lexie’s hands and wrists weren’t visible, but her arms were stretched tightly, as if they were being pulled. As if the boy kneeling at her head was holding them, keeping them out of his friend’s way.