“I . . . don’t know,” Will said. But in the few seconds that it took for him to get those words out, he remembered exactly what he was looking at. It was the garage door opener from the house on River Road. He had the faintest memory of seeing a kid toss it into the bed of the truck as they carried in the cases of liquor and beer that Will had brought. He’d forgotten all about it, and it must have lodged in the tangle of bungee cords and tarps that Will kept back there. He looked up and locked eyes with the detective.

“Why don’t you follow me?” the detective said, turning and walking toward the entrance to headquarters. And Will, realizing that whatever good luck he’d been counting on had just come to an end, took the last of the sports equipment over to the collection bin and followed the detective into the station.

It hadn’t gone down the way Will imagined. There were no handcuffs, and he wasn’t led to a holding cell. It was more like being brought to the principal’s office: the officer sat him down on a chair next to his desk and let him call his parents, even though he was eighteen. He hadn’t known his lawyer’s phone number.

The detective, who reintroduced himself as Detective Murray, recited Will’s rights for him, but didn’t bother to question him right away. To Will, whose entire body was coursing with an almost painful nervous energy, Detective Murray seemed oddly calm. When Will’s parents arrived, his father was wearing an old suit that Will had only ever seen him wear to funerals. For some reason, this scared him more than anything else.

When their lawyer, Ed DeLeo, arrived, Detective Murray led them to a conference table. The District Attorney arrived last, nodded to Ed, and introduced himself as Hal Buckley.

Pleasantries finished, the DA laid out the situation: Originally, Will had been charged with misdemeanor trespassing and vandalism. But the discovery of the garage door opener in his truck changed this. The DA’s office was now recommending that Will be charged as the organizer of the party, with a felony criminal mischief charge and a vandalism charge that would rate as a felony because of the amount of the damage, well over the five-thousand-dollar threshold.

“But I wasn’t . . .” Will broke in, before his lawyer shushed him. He was going to say that he wasn’t the only one who caused damage, and Detective Murray seemed to read his mind.

“With the evidence that we have against you, we can hold you responsible for a much greater portion of the damage,” Murray explained, looking down at the garage opener that lay on the table between them in a plastic bag. “We have witness statements, and we have physical evidence. You’re not getting out of this one.”