Why not indeed. Since the night in the hospital when Detective Pete Sunday described the injury that the golf club had wrought to the back of Belinda’s head—and in a blurt of new nausea I now realized that image was now twinned in my mind with the photo of Jessamyn we had just seen—I hadn’t dared to risk knowing anything more. In fact, I made it a point not to know anything more. Who in my situation would want to? What good could it possibly do? Or was I just too locked in shock to question anything at all? I just knew I had to move forward.

Until Stefan came home from prison, unless I was at work or on my way to visit him there, I deliberately fuddled my consciousness. There was no trial as such, just a judge who heard Stefan’s guilty plea and the lawyer’s account of our son’s lack of intent and diminished capacity. When we heard the sentence, we felt relieved, lucky even. After that, I had one purpose, keeping Stefan alive until he could come home. I didn’t want to know about the rest of the world. It worked alarmingly well, as if I’d brought on my own early dementia. I even started losing things, not just the customary car keys or folder of papers, but my grandmother’s opal watch and my first edition of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Jep’s gift to me when I completed my PhD. Being a part-time eccentric during that period of time was a fair price for a mind that was free from fomenting bad thoughts. But it had its pitfalls. If it was late at night and I was vulnerable to intrusive thoughts, I could get comfortably foggy with two pills or two fingers of Scotch, or both, until I was well on my way to four pills and four fingers of Scotch and had to give that up entirely. I still tried to keep Stefan’s account of his vague memories of that night in the abstract—the screams and shadows and then one terrible, dull sound, everything happening in the time it takes to speak it, a twenty-second interval when the gleaming train of Belinda’s future slammed to a halt.

So why did I want to bring everything into sharp focus now? I didn’t, not at all. Yet how could I ever put this behind me if I didn’t first face it? I might finally need to muster the courage I lacked before—to know more, to know everything, to know the specifics of that horrific night that were as much a blur to me as they were to Stefan, who’d at least had the courage to face his journey of redemption.