“I didn’t ask yet. Not in so many words. But I think she does. She said one time that her mom was five or six years older than her dad. I’m going to win her.” The hundred objections I could have mounted melted in the sun of that courtly phrase. This was none of my business, at least not yet.

In the meantime, Stefan is wildly overcommitted, with school and with work and night classes in fire science at the community college. He longs to become a volunteer firefighter, and perhaps eventually do that as a career if he likes it. It’s as if he’s wheeling in space, looking at all the doors opening to him, the former felon. It’s as if he’s making up for lost time.

I have my own business to attend to. Paradoxically, I am writing another book; in fact, it’s finished now, but not yet published. It’s not about the case, exactly, but about something I never thought I’d tilt with. Forgiveness, it transpires, is not just a slogan on a coffee mug. It’s the hardest work a human being can do, or at least that this human being can do. It controverts both your instinct and your intellect. I initially thought I would write about the experience of lives kidnapped by one woman’s malevolence. But Aeschylus was right—and how could I have doubted such a wise and voluble Greek? Wisdom, if a human being ever can be said to achieve wisdom, comes through pain, drop by drop, in our own despair, against our will. The deeper I dug, the more I unavoidably understood. The universe has its own forces.

A force for good, dialed up many notches, can do harm. Jill’s obsessive love for Belinda was the perfect twin to my love for Stefan. Stefan’s love for Belinda...Emily’s love for Belinda...they made up a hall of mirrors, each reflecting back the love that pushed them to obsession. But if those obsessions led to terrible acts of wrongdoing, the love itself was never wrong.

Jill was charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon, obstruction of justice, malicious prosecution, filing a false police report and contempt of court. She was sentenced to five to eight years. We sued her for defamation of character and her insurance was ample. Stefan received a small settlement from the state of Wisconsin, which has a lousy reputation for parsimonious compensation, but settled with Black Creek County for much more in a lawsuit for wrongful conviction.

That is the shining side of my personal planet. There is a dark side.