“After Eldon, Katie’s dad, died, they started looking at me differently. No one would have touched me as long as he was around. He’d have beat the shit out of them, killed them, probably. But once he was gone, there’d be comments, little cracks, like ‘Hey, ledger lady, I’ve got six inches for you to calculate.’ Or, ‘Let’s multiply.’ Clever stuff, you know?”

And then she told me about the night of November 18, 2001. The night they took turns.

“They held me down. Like fucking dogs. Everyone except Leo. He just stood off in a corner, shaking his head, whimpering like. Fletcher was first, then Gary, then Smith and Heighton. One after another.”

She waited, wondering whether I wanted to react, whether I had anything I wanted to say, but all I could do was listen.

She told me about Gary’s visit to her apartment two days later. Finding her with her eleven-month-old girl in her arms. Hands her a “Come Back to Work Soon” Hallmark card with $110 inside.

I listened. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the hawk circling.

“You know the part I can never figure out?” she said, looking at me again. “The ten bucks. A hundred, and ten. Was that the tip? Was the ten bucks for expenses? What the fuck do you think the ten was for? Baby formula, maybe?”

All I could offer was a shake of the head.

“But you know what I did? I went back to work. Went back and did my fucking job. I’d already been planning my move, I was moving the money around, into accounts, skimming off cash where I could, and I wasn’t done yet. I still needed more. I was putting together getting some new ID, in the name of Trixie Snelling. I was putting things into place, to make a new life for myself and my daughter. But I didn’t have enough. So I had to go back there, go back and sit in that room, day after day, putting on my smiley face, with a pack of rapists.”

Softly, I said, “I don’t know how you could do that. It must have been…I don’t know. I can’t imagine.”

“And I carried on, making like nothing happened, like a hundred and ten dollars and a Hallmark card was all it took to make the memory of a gang bang go away. And for a while, they were even a little sheepish. Getting me tea, being real sweet, you know? Like, hey, sorry about turning you inside out, but here’s a cup of Earl Grey.”

“So,” I said, “that wasn’t the night it happened.”