“It’s okay,” she said. “They’ll understand. Ryan will understand. He will.” She sounded calm, logical, perfectly in control of her story. “Blake told Jennifer all about Aaron Knicely and the Steiner girls. He told Jennifer who was really driving that night. Not you, Ryan. Him. Blake. He told Jennifer that he was driving. He did it because he slipped up and drank again. And you know as well as I do that makes him loose-tongued. I’m not thrilled he told someone else before he told me, but it was the drinking that did it. That’s why he had to stop when we got back together.” She spoke about Blake as if he wasn’t there, like he was her child and she was sharing her struggles with him at a support group. “When he ended the relationship with her to get back together with me, she threatened to tell. Maybe she was bluffing and just wanted to make him squirm, but how could we take that chance? You know what that’s like, Ryan. When you don’t want your dirty laundry aired for all to see. She . . . Jennifer . . . was going to tell the police that Blake was driving that night and put him in legal jeopardy. Hell, she tried to tell you, Ryan. Why do you think she reached out to you just a few days ago on Facebook?”

“I thought she wanted something else. Something . . . romantic. I didn’t imagine . . .”

“She told me that day when I went over there. She was trying to tell you the truth about the accident. That Blake was driving, and you were off the hook. She was going to show you the letters. But you ignored her. If you’d responded and talked to her, you would have known then. Instead, I went to get the letters back. To keep Blake from legal jeopardy. To keep everyone from knowing. And then Blake and I would get married, and it would all be settled.”

“What happened at her house?” I asked.

“I thought she’d listen to reason. You know, one woman to another. I just slipped over there in the evening. I didn’t think it would take long. And if I hadn’t gone there, everything we’d planned would have been out the window. All of this.” She gestured to the Barn, the surrounding landscape, everything that was to come in the future. “We couldn’t have that, could we? Not when we were so close to having it all worked out.”

Her words were calm and reasonable. She didn’t allow for the possibility that there could be any objection to anything she said.

“What went wrong when you got there?” I asked.

Sam reached up and brushed at a corner of her eye. Either a tear or a makeup smudge. I couldn’t say which.