“Ten years. Ever since my ankles gave out.” Eva sits down behind the desk. “But you’re not here to talk about my dance career.”

“No, Eva, I’m not. I’m just trying to find out what happened that night after homecoming.”

“Who told you?” Her brown eyes are blazing.

“Somebody who was there that night. Somebody who heard that you were assaulted.”

“Only the other person in that room knows what happened to me. I did tell my friend Floyd Whelan, but when he tried to write a news story about it, he was threatened into silence.”

“You never told anybody? Never went to the campus police?”

“Do you know anything about Hanover twenty years ago? What it was like to be a skinny Black girl from Barbados? Nobody was going to listen to me.”

“I know about Hanover. I was there not long after you were. I know what it’s like to get the wrong kind of attention. Or no attention at all.” Bob Woodward’s comment about interviews suddenly comes to mind: “Let the silence suck out the truth.”

Slowly, it comes…

“I went to the homecoming bonfire with some other first-year students from my dorm and had some vodka shots. Then somebody brought us all to a party off campus. I barely knew anyone there and I lost track of the people I came with.”

“They left you there alone?”

Clarke shrugs. “People kept handing me drinks. I remember the music was really loud and I started feeling woozy. I was sitting on a sofa with my head between my knees. Then I felt a hand on my back. I heard a guy asking me if I was okay. I said I needed to lie down, which I know was a totally stupid thing to say.”

“Not if you’re about to get sick.”

“I look up and see a guy in a Big Green football jersey. It wasn’t until days later that I figured out it was Cole Wright. He picked me up like he was carrying a baby. I felt like I was floating. I didn’t even know where we were going until he put me down on a bed. I was kind of in and out. Room spinning, that old cliché.”

My pulse is racing. “What did he do next?”

“He put a blanket over me and left.”

“He didn’t…”

“He didn’t touch me. It was somebody else.”

“You’re sure it wasn’t Cole?”