Claudia supposed it was naive to have assumed Edie would forgive her for missing the birth. Should she leave a voice mail explaining what happened? I think I dropped my phone after I got raped. On campus there were little purple stickers in the bathrooms: Have you been a victim of sexual assault? Tell someone. The stickers had a phone number and a website. Confidential, they promised. And the nurse had said she trained the people on the other end of the phone. But Claudia wasn’t stupid. The “counselor” at the mandatory freshman orientation was a junior: not a professional, and definitely not above gossip. Did you hear Claudia Castro says somebody raped her? One of those disgusting reality TV blogs that called her “the other woman” last week would probably pay ten grand for that headline.

And now Edie was against her, too. Her sister’s text was ice cold. A text she’d send to a colleague: we have to be careful about germs. What was she saying? Was she saying Claudia was dirty? Sick? How could she know she was suddenly, possibly, both?

She considered calling her father. He hadn’t actually been around any more than her mother during her childhood, but he knew how to really listen—as a music producer, that was basically his job. Claudia’s parents met at a party on the Lower East Side in 1993, four years after Gabriel Castro moved three thousand miles away from Fresno to a city he’d only seen in movies. Both sides of his family had been in the San Joaquin Valley for generations: immigrants from Portugal and Armenia mixed with lapsed Mormons and Oklahoma farmers blown west by the Depression. His parents were high school sweethearts: Dad, Robert, was the only son of a widowed recruiter stationed at the naval air base in Lemoore; Mom, Brenda, grew up working the counter and measuring feet at her parents’ shoe store. Vietnam called, and Robert found out Brenda was pregnant when she wrote to him at basic training. When he came home, they got married and Robert got a job as a mechanic at a private airport on the northwest side of town. But his son Freddy didn’t know him and neither did Brenda—not anymore. Their marriage lasted five years; six months after Gabe turned two, Robert moved out.

The boys didn’t see their dad often—he moved around, taking jobs out of state, living with roommates and sometimes in motels—but when they did, he was sober and kind and he taught Gabe how to play the guitar.