My husband called it the First Law of Thea-dynamics: I could take anything and transform it into energy that could then never be destroyed. And he was right. I would never admit it, but my personality was such that once I got involved with something, it was like hearing a fragment of a song you knew and having no choice but to sing the whole thing in your head, over and over, for days, until something blessedly intervened and bore it away. I’d once raised three baby robins from turquoise eggs no bigger than the tip of my thumb to fledglings that took wing to the sky behind our garage. When I couldn’t find a couch I liked, I built one and upholstered it. I would turn that tenacity to Stefan now. I would apply it to the future, and to the past. If it had been the drugs for Stefan, well, then, he didn’t use them anymore. If Belinda’s death had truly been an accident, well, even the most wretched accidents are accidental, and they happen in the world.

I never fully realized that others lived like I did, and that some of them were people I knew, people who would never give up unless the choice was death or ruin. Months after Stefan’s conviction, after I gave a talk, I was approached by a woman who said that the belief that things would somehow always get better was a character flaw particular to Americans and American culture, and especially to American parents. They stand shivering in the dark forest but insist the sunny plain is just ahead, she said. Why, I asked the woman, do you think? She was Chinese, a pediatric hematologist, and she smiled sadly when she told me: Why, what else would you expect when their own parents ruined them for reality by raising them on the sweetened milk of hope?

My thoughts were interrupted when my cell phone sang out, Debussy’s Clair de Lune. It was a local Madison number, not that this meant anything. Stefan was asleep in the passenger seat. Even though I had to take a quick glance away from the road, I picked up.

“You don’t know the real truth,” said a young female voice. “But I do.”

“What truth is this?” I asked. Unless I was much mistaken, her answer would have God in it.

“I saw what happened that night,” she said. “The night Belinda was killed. I was there.”

“You weren’t,” I said.

“I was.”

“And you waited until now to reveal this.”

Then the voice on the other end of the phone started to cry and cried so hard that for a moment, all I could hear was the bellows of her breathing. “I had to! But I can’t stand it anymore. Nobody knows the truth except me.” Then she hung up.