Of course I hadn’t listened to it. The podcast was the last thing in the world I wanted to listen to. It had real audio from Claire Bingley’s interviews with police, which I’d heard during the trial and sometimes heard even now in my nightmares. The podcast contained recorded snippets of my own interrogations, my desperate pleas with my colleagues. It had detailed reports from the doctors who’d examined Claire, cataloguing the injuries she’d suffered. It had audio from the frantic, tearful public appeal Dale and his wife made the evening of her disappearance. It made me sick just thinking about it.

“It’s pretty good,” Sweeney said.

“Pretty good?” I asked. She didn’t notice my disdain.

“I’m up to about episode five, I think. They’ve gone all the way through the crime, the witness accounts, the interviews. They’re pointing out the inconsistencies. They have some pretty compelling theories.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s the number one podcast in Germany, you know,” she said. “They have eight million subscribers over there. Do you interact with Innocent Ted at all?”

“No.” I cleared my throat in what I hoped was a dismissive way, trying to end the discussion. “The woman who started it copped some real problems, so I don’t … I don’t want to encourage it.”

“You don’t want to encourage it?” Sweeney squinted at me. “But these people think you’re innocent.”

“I know,” I said, trying to resist the anger swirling up from the pit of my stomach. “And that’s great. Really. But I don’t want to draw any more attention to myself, if it’s all the same. I’m sure the podcast is very entertaining. But as long as I’m free, I just want to live my life quietly and try to get past everything that’s happened. People going around wearing Innocent Ted T-shirts and commenting on the website isn’t going to give me my marriage back. Or my job. Or my relationship with my daughter. It’s not going to replace the time I spent in prison. Or help Claire Bingley recover from the attack. Or give her parents their marriage back. Or…”

“I get it,” she said.

“Or convince people who have already decided that—”

“Okay, okay! I get it.” She touched me on the shoulder. I found that my fists were clenched. When I unclenched them, my knuckles cracked. I kept my eyes fixed on the rainforest. It was getting scary, my desire to go off on long rants like this, my words speeding up, slurring into each other.

The anger had been a long time coming. When I first got out of prison, I’d been too tired and relieved to be angry. But these days I was angry at everyone, even people who sympathized with me. My goose-wife didn’t mind my bleating on and on about my problems, but I’d have to tone it down in front of humans if I wanted to maintain the few people I had who were willing to listen to me at all.