“I overreacted last night. I’m sorry, Bree. We’re both flayed, so neither of us handled things well. But I need you to believe me. I didn’t do a damn thing to Lexie Pine that she didn’t start. That she didn’t want. It kills me, just kills me, to think you can’t believe me.”

I thought he said these things because his own belief was shaken. He looked pale and as wrung out as I felt. I stared into his sincere eyes, open wide, true blue, begging me to believe that he was not a rapist. But he was. His gaze begged me to believe he was a good man. He was that as well. For the first time, it occurred to me that Trey could not be an anomaly.

I’d always thought of rapists, especially the college kind, in terms of serial criminals. Predators, with something black and broken at the heart of them. At Georgia State, Betsy and I had gone to dorm seminars where we learned how to not get raped. There we learned we must use the buddy system, open our own drinks, and never leave them unattended. They told us, Most men are nice. But there are a few bad apples out there who will hurt you. They come to parties specifically to find that girl who is alone and drunk and vulnerable. The one they can peel away from the edge of the herd. Don’t be that girl.

They never told us about other kinds of danger. Now I met my dear, sweet husband’s gaze, and I wondered how many perfectly nice men, grown up or grown old, had in their younger years lost a night, like Trey. Drunk or high or both. In packs or alone. And something happened. Once.

These days, in the high school where my nieces went, they had seminars for the boys as well, teaching them how to not be rapists. College, too, I assumed. Trey’s generation hadn’t. Mine either; Betsy and I had understood that not getting raped was our job. We had to behave right. To stay safe from bad men, yes. But those seminars had also made it our job to protect nice boys from raping us.

“What do you want to do?” I asked. I would not replay last night’s argument again in public, and he had come out swinging. He was saying he could not admit it or live with it. He was saying if I pushed him, I would break us. I could feel the heat of Lexie’s furious gaze. I would not betray her. I did not want to lose my marriage.

He said, “We should go to therapy together, is what I’m thinking. Talk all this through with a mediator.”