“She is that night to me! Don’t you get that? Do you think I could ever look at her without reliving every second of those rapes?”

I shrug and stay silent. I am not a woman. I can’t know. “When I told you Presley was coming to kill your father, you said you hoped he would come.”

“I’d kill him in a minute,” she says in a flat voice. “Like stepping on a cockroach.”

“I knew it was something like this. Something dark.”

“Dark? The whole thing is so Sally Jessy Raphael it makes me want to vomit.”

“You didn’t tell your father Presley had raped you?”

A shadow of shame crosses her face. “No. I’d started the whole thing, hadn’t I? I suppose I could have lied and said he attacked me out of the blue, but my father is pretty hard to lie to. He’s scary that way. He sees dishonesty in people.”

“Maybe because he’s so dishonest himself.”

“Don’t, Penn.”

“But he knew you were pregnant. Eventually, I mean.”

She nods. “My sister told him. She’d gotten pregnant three years before, and Daddy made her get an abortion. It really messed her up. Our great Catholic parents practically forcing her to terminate her pregnancy. You’d think that when I turned up pregnant, she would have done all she could to help me hide it. But she’d felt inferior to me her whole life. I was the special one, the adored one. She just had to tell them that I’d screwed up as badly as she had.”

“Livy, why in God’s name did you have the baby? Under the circumstances—”

“Under the circumstances, I wasn’t thinking rationally, okay? After the rape I was so upset, I went to Radcliffe a week early. Two months later, when I found out for sure I was pregnant, I thought about terminating it. But then my sister blabbed, and the next thing I knew, my father was in Cambridge trying to force me to have an abortion. You know how he and I are. The simple fact that he tried to force me was enough to make me refuse, especially after all the lip service he’d paid to Catholic dogma. But more than that, the pregnancy gave me a chance I’d never had before. An absolute excuse to break the pattern laid out for me before I was born. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew I didn’t want to spend four years at Ole Miss in a sorority full of girls majoring in fashion merchandising and looking for husbands.”

“Thanks for telling me in time to change my plans.”

A momentary look of penitence. “I’m sorry about that. I never told you to go there.”