I watched her. She sat against a cinder-block wall, the right strap of her dress blood-speckled from helping me to the car. “Next time,” I said, “just tell me to fuck off. Something simple.”

She said nothing. After a moment she rose and took a cool rag from the nightstand, running it across my face. Her finger gently traced the stitches beneath one eye. “What’s happened to us, Adam?”

I tried smiling. “You cheat at backgammon—”

“The baby?”

“Krissy, stop—”

“I mean it’s not just coming here and Daddy, is it?”

“Not now.” I reached up, my fingers disappearing in her hair. She closed her eyes.

“I don’t know who you are.”

I looked away. “When my father died I stopped thinking about that. My mother needed someone and I was there. Then she wanted a lawyer—someone who wouldn’t desert her by being killed—and I became one. I don’t know—I don’t like talking this way.”

“But why?”

“Because words don’t make any difference. You string them all together and in the end people define themselves by what they do.”

She shook her head. “Word games, Adam. There’s too much we never say.”

I looked up again. “Like what happened between you and Jason Cantwell?”

She stiffened. “What do you mean?”

“The way you avoided him at our engagement party, how afraid you are. Roland giving you that gun and how desperate you were to keep it. You’ve been trying to tell me ever since Lydia was murdered, and I haven’t listened.”

“He killed Lydia—”

“What happened in the garden, Krissy?”

She looked startled. In a muted voice, she said, “It doesn’t matter now.”

“Krissy, you’ve been threatened and now I’ve been pistol-whipped and shot at. It matters.”

She stared at a spot beside my head. “All right.” She said it bluntly, angrily. “He tried to rape me.”

“How?”

“How do you suppose?” When I didn’t answer, she spoke hurriedly, getting it over. “One Sunday when I was sixteen Daddy took me by to visit after church. Sometimes he’d do that. That day Henry and Lydia got to talking with Daddy, and Jason said why didn’t we go out back. He was talking too fast and wouldn’t look at me but I thought it was mostly shyness. I didn’t know until it was too late.”

“Easy,” I said. “I know that. Just tell me what happened.”

Her eyes were wide with memory. “Is this really necessary?”

I took her hand. “Yes. It is.”