“Oh yes, even as my piece of trash husband embezzled money from my father’s church, the church my father founded, and dragged his name through the dirt,” she said. One of the first things Jill confided in me, when she moved to Wisconsin from North Carolina was how it took every ounce of spiritual strength she had to go on believing after Lowell’s death. In the shadowed gully where he’d fallen hard, fallen sixty feet down from the slope where they were skiing a sunset run, the two of them alone together, Jill held Lowell’s hand and sang to him as he died, knowing she couldn’t leave him even to summon help, his spine was severed, she couldn’t let him die alone. She waited until the light went out of his eyes, and only then did she make her way back up onto the track. She was an expert skier. What had really happened to Lowell McCormack? Was this Jill now or Jill always?

“If you’re going to do this, you don’t have to do it right this moment. There’s nobody here but us. Don’t I at least get to understand?”

“You’re stalling for time. In a story, this would work. But this isn’t a story. You don’t have any options.”

“But you do. Jill, think. As of right now, nothing has happened. You got hysterical, and who wouldn’t, and you made some threats, and nothing happened. This can stop, right here. Nobody has to know. It’s a mistake, not a tragedy.”

“So how do you suffer then?”

“Don’t you think he suffered in jail? Maybe not as much as you wanted him to...”

“And you? How do you suffer now, Thea?”

“I have to live with knowing what he did, all my life. I have to live with wondering how I raised a son who could...”

Jill lowered the gun so that it was nearly touching Stefan’s hair. I heard his breath catch, as it had when he was a toddler trying not to cry.

“Okay, you don’t have to live with that, Thea.”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you stupid?” Jill said, lower now. “I know Emily told you. I know she came to see you. I know she left town.”

“Told me what?”

“Everything! About the fight I had with Belinda that night. After I found that photo of them, their disgusting photo, their love letters. I was begging her, how can you do this? How can you choose to live in such sin? And Bindy was crying and she said she loved Emily but she loved Stefan too.”

“Jill! Stop this! You weren’t even there that night.”