Vera pressed her lips together. ‘Call me awful, but I couldn’t believe my husband had a relationship with a sixteen-year-old.’

Her eyes studied my face, searching for my reaction, and I knew it deep inside me: I believed in John’s goodness.

In over a month of trying to quell my stupid crush, he’d never done anything even close to inappropriate with me. He loved Vera; even more, he respected her. I knew vile, hollow men. Davis. All those awful guys in college. John wasn’t one of them.

What’s more, this explained it all. The graffiti. The way Maggie had told me to watch out for them. The tires, most definitely slashed by Claire’s father. It wasn’t an affair; it was a rumor.

‘I don’t believe it, either,’ I said finally.

A smile crept across Vera’s face.

‘So you want to leave because of this gossip?’ I asked.

She sighed. ‘If it were only that, I would stay and try my best to hold my head high. It’s the lawsuit that’s got us scared.’

‘Lawsuit?’

She sank into the cushions, as if begging them to swallow her whole, and Dusty nestled himself between us. ‘Claire’s father. He’s a top contractor in the area – through his business, he’s become friends with a bunch of lawyers, even a judge – and he’s over here all the time, driving up and down the road. He says he’s just helping out his wife with her work, but I know the truth. I know he wants to scare us. Sam Alby.’ She paused, narrowing her eyes at me. ‘You haven’t seen him, have you? When you moved in or anything?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t see many people on this street.’

‘Okay.’ She sighed. ‘At first he was going on about a criminal case, but nothing ever came of it; then he started talking about a lawsuit. He hasn’t filed yet – from what I hear, his lawyer is still speaking to people in town, trying to get witnesses to assassinate John’s character – but it’s going to happen very soon. It has to. In New York, the statute of limitations for emotional distress is only one year.’