I’m not a killer or a rapist. I’m just a man. There are things I am, and things I used to be. I used to be a cop, a new father, a devoted husband. I’d been someone who could never imagine myself wearing handcuffs, sitting in the back of a prison van, standing in the queue for chow in a correctional facility food hall, a wife-killer in front of me and a bank robber behind. There had been only one little girl in my life, my daughter Lillian, whose existence on the Earth I was still measuring in weeks when I was arrested.

I used to read voraciously. I drank red wine, and I danced in the kitchen with my wife. I regularly wore odd socks and I often left beard stubble in the bathroom sink. I was an ordinary guy.

Now I was a runaway living on the edge of nowhere, looking for crocs, watching the sun disappear beyond the mountains across the lake. Wandering back up the hill, my hands in my pockets and bad thoughts swirling. When an accusation like that comes into your life, it never leaves. The story of what I had done to Claire Bingley played on and on, in the minds of my ex-colleagues, my friends, my wife, Claire Bingley’s parents, and the barrister who prosecuted me before my trial collapsed; they saw it just as vividly as I saw it. An unreal reality. A false truth.

People passed the story on to each other in whispers as I walked into the court in cuffs. The media printed it. The television stations ran it. The story was so real that it came to me in flashes of light in the strangest moments—while I was showering, while I was sitting alone on the porch drinking Wild Turkey and watching the water. I dreamed about it often, woke sweating and twisted in my sheets.

I am not, and never have been, a pedophile. I don’t find children sexually attractive. I never laid a hand on Claire Bingley. But that doesn’t matter. To the world, I am a monster. Nothing was ever going to change that.

Working on my goose house seemed to drive out the darkness, so I went to the newly erected structure and stood before it, making plans. Around me on the sprawling, empty lawn seven geese wandered, plucking at the grass, muttering and clucking contentedly to one another. When one settled by my feet, her hunger apparently sated, I reached down and stroked the back of her soft gray neck, the feathers collapsing, weightless, until I felt the soft, warm flesh of her neck underneath. My geese don’t think I’m a monster, and that’s something, at least.