The details turned out to be ludicrous: My assailant, a veteran nurse certified to counsel rape victims, was only fifty, but she dressed up to look at least twenty-five years older to divert suspicion. Since the organizers picked up my medical costs, the stitches for my lip, the cost of my ruined white wool jacket, she ended up only paying a fine of $100. I declined to press further charges for assault.

I spent the next couple of days feeling sore and spent and feeling really sorry for myself. There were calls from virtually everyone I knew, even the cousins I only saw every few years at my aunt Helen’s family reunion. I slept long hours, often from dinnertime until ten the next morning, waking disoriented from blank, cavernous sleep that was the gift of the robust painkillers. If only such great medicine weren’t also so dangerous, for such sleep was not only my wish generally but specifically right now. I just wanted to sleep until Pete Sunday located Esme and questioned her.

Dithering about whether to tell Jep was a torment. There was almost nothing I didn’t confide in him, particularly if it was important. Whenever we were together, I felt as though I was cheating on him. And yet, when I pictured the pained look that would steal over his face at my latest piece of detective work, as he tried to understand how my own hunches and the text messages had combined to concoct this cataclysmic conclusion, I just couldn’t bring myself to say anything. Julie was right; everything would be revealed in time, if it turned out that there was anything to reveal.

I did tell Jep about Jill’s message.

“Should I call her?”

“Don’t ask me.” He put his hands up in front of him. “I’m just a simple guy. I don’t know about the protocol for this tortured emotional stuff.”

“Right, okay, draw the old Disney movie football coach card.”

“Why do you have to get so bitchy? Go or don’t go. She’s not dangerous, Thea. She’s not going to kill you.”

“I’m scared to go. Will you go with me?”

“I absolutely will not go with you,” he said. “I’ll drive you and wait for you, but I’m not going to face off with Jill McCormack.” He went to the refrigerator and began getting out ingredients for about four kinds of snacks, plus the chia seeds he was now obsessed with sprinkling on everything. My tension was so great that I wanted to smack him. A moment later, he muttered, “You should have thought of this before.”

“Before? Before what, Jep? Before The Healing Project? Or before I had our son, because it doesn’t come from your side of the family, huh?”