“No, I’m just saying that if I do the one thing, I may as well chuck it all and do everything else. I’d be turning my back on my wife—I wouldn’t want to look her in the eye.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“You had the conversation with her. She told you about the secrecy of the life she lived. She was too afraid and ashamed to go for help. It would have meant telling me. I wasn’t supposed to understand. I didn’t, anyway. I do now, or at least better than before, and I couldn’t hope to be honest with her again if I went home and tried to give her a true account of this and then said that I had decided that most people would never understand what had happened to MacIver, that it was better to forget about it. Karen is a woman who wants to leave something good with everything she does. I’d be telling her that that time of her life was just worthless, that no matter what she thought, she really lived it for nothing. That’s what I would be turning my back on, just when it was clearest to me. I wouldn’t want to look at her; I wouldn’t want her to look at me.”

“You’re dealing with other lives as well. I think she would understand that.”

“I know she would. But she would wonder how long I would be able to stay on the tightrope. I couldn’t tell her that a thing was worthless and then accept it as part of my life. She would wonder when I would start thinking of the other opportunities I had passed up. I could figure some way to keep them open, too. And I would start thinking, she would be right. No matter who would be helped, no matter how much suffering would be avoided, if I went to Norma to lie, the important thing to me would be the edge I’d taken for myself. I wouldn’t be where I am today if there had been no Leikman case. Because of it, I make more money than I know how to spend. If I do this, I’ll go back to the beginning and retrace every step, but this time around I’ll take every dollar and shake every hand with the knowledge that I conspired against Felix Tesla, that I knew he was innocent all along. There isn’t a man I call my friend who wouldn’t feel the same way. Karen told me to think of myself. You tell me how I could go on building a life with her. You tell me how I could draw another free breath.”

“So you’ll go to the police,” Roberts said. “That’s why you’ll go to the police.”