“Oh baby, oh poor you,” Julie said. “I have some wet wipes in the trunk. Wait.” She got them out and pulled a few for me, rabbits from a hat. I sat in the weeds and scrubbed at my teeth and the collar of my shirt. “We should have known it could be like this.”

“I thought it would be more civilized,” I finally said, trying to blink the black stars away from my vision.

“I guess I did, too. But this is awful stuff, Thea. We shouldn’t expect it to be sanitized, should we? People process unspeakable loss in whatever way they can, to find the strength to live with it and go on. And this might be just the beginning. Roman is not a bad man. He’s a decent man who made a bad mistake, something you know all about. But some of the participants we might meet after this, well, like Merry says, they may be Saul, not Paul. There’s a good chance they will be bad-deed doers who want to change. But the bad stuff they did, they might have done on purpose. That’s what the project will have to face. That’s what the real making of this effort is about.”

“The worst of them, though, they wouldn’t be sorry. Right?”

“I don’t know,” Julie said, and shrugged. “I don’t know that many people who have killed other people.”

“You sound like my mother now. They’re not our sort of crowd. Most killers don’t know very many people who’ve killed other people.”

“That’s true.”

“What I meant is that I didn’t know how awful it could be...on the other side of tragedy.”

“Well, that woman would have been a perfectly nice person her whole life, with a husband, daughter and two grandkids, if none of this ever happened. Right?” I got back into the car, gratefully accepting Julie’s offer of a bottle of water and a sleeve of saltines that she found in the trunk. What else did she have back there? She intuited my look and told me, chocolate bars, baby wipes, blankets. “I knew someday I might get stuck in my car but I decided that at least I’d never die of hunger or thirst.” I smiled at her and tentatively patted her hand.