Trey didn’t even know it yet. I dreaded telling him. There were so many things we could say to each other, shattering, awful things that we would never be able to unhear. I’d been stupid, and I’d gotten so much wrong. I was the one who’d looked away from Robert. I’d been too afraid to call Trey or the police. I’d obeyed, blindly, and my decisions had led to Spence’s death. I could not bear it if my husband came at me, using all these things I blamed myself for as weapons, and yet I had such an ugly, blame-soaked question aimed at him. It was sour as bile, bubbling in the back of my throat.

What did you do?

As we drove through spats of dark, gray rain, I prayed hard that the answer would be, Nothing. It was Spencer. It frightened me, how badly I wanted the Wilkersons to say, Spencer Shaw? Oh, yes. We go way back, and we helped him do awful things. Illegal things to slant a court case his way, and of course, his partner, Trey, knew nothing.

It wouldn’t absolve me of my part in Spence’s death, but it would make it a little easier to live with. More important, it killed the awful question that felt like a gun in my hand, aimed at my husband. If Trey’s worst sin were being ignorant or blind to Spencer’s doings, then I’d already forgiven him.

Ever since they’d gone their separate ways in law school, Spence had been more colleague than friend, but Trey couldn’t cut Spence out entirely. They were family. They worked together at a firm where over half the partners were relatives of both by birth or marriage.

When we saw Spence socially, it was tied to a client dinner or some other work obligation. Trey sometimes hung out with Spence alone, especially as Spence’s marriages had failed, but he steered clear of Spence’s posse of hard-drinking male friends. That set went off on high-stakes Vegas weekends and booze-fueled hunting trips, and they were not averse to a little coke or speed or Adderall. Almost all of them were divorced. Some more than once, and for the same reasons that had broken up Spencer’s marriages. Trey kept a clean line between himself and all that. I knew this. I had seen it. So it made sense to me that Trey would not be part of Spencer’s darker legal doings either.