My heart ticked faster. John wasn’t like that. John couldn’t be like that. ‘There were rumors that they were what, Vera?’

She blinked slowly. ‘I don’t know, Lucy. It was all hearsay, but … well, you know.’

Vera, brutally honest Vera. She’d run up against something even she couldn’t say out loud.

‘Did she actually … accuse him?’

Vera shook her head quickly. ‘No, but still …’ She pressed her hands to her knees. ‘I overheard someone talking about him at Platform, that bar we told you about – I used to go there for happy hour, after I closed up the gallery – maybe they didn’t realize his wife was sitting right there, or maybe they did and just didn’t care. Anyway, I went home, and I just lost it. I broke half the dishes in the cabinet. Good stuff, too. Stuff he’d gotten from his grandmother and all that. But when John got home, he swore up and down that nothing had ever happened. He seemed appalled that I’d even think it, with a teenager and everything. I asked him how the talk started, and he said he didn’t know. Maybe some of her friends let their imaginations get the best of them. Half the people in that class had a crush on him – you’ve seen John, he’s a good-looking guy.’

‘But if the girl never even said he did anything …’

Vera sighed. ‘Her dad was furious, came to our house screaming, saying he knew something happened. Afterward, I tried to talk to Claire, but she didn’t want to talk to me. And then I guess people found out about that and thought I was harassing, well, a survivor, you know.’ She lifted a hand, then let it drop. ‘I wasn’t harassing her. I was just trying to understand. I only ever tried to talk to her a couple of times, but people made it sound like I was stalking her or something, and then that got around, and it all just snowballed. People thought it didn’t matter if Claire accused John or not – she was a child, and tons of crimes like this are never reported, which I obviously know. I’m a feminist, too. I just …’ Her voice trailed off.

I knew the words running through my head were wrong. You believed these sorts of stories. You just did. That’s what you did if you were a good woman, a good human. I remember reading about that film director, how the girl he raped didn’t even want the government to go after him, not after so many years; I had told Ellie that it didn’t matter – he still deserved his punishment, no matter what the victim thought, what the victim said.

Only this seemed different. This was John. I took a deep breath. ‘Do you actually think it’s true?’