Sabrina nods. “I think she was trying to protect me because I was younger. A few times she found me in the hall with a pass to his office, and she would calmly, without saying a word, take it from my hands and go in my place. I never got to thank her for that.”

A sob lodges itself below my thyroid gland, squatting like a toad in the throat.

“And then she went away,” Sabrina says softly. “And no one could protect me after that.”

I close my eyes and press my lips together to keep the toad from escaping. “She was pregnant,” I tell Sabrina.

When I open my eyes, Sabrina is crying without sound. Nothing about her face, her demeanor, has changed except the wetness around her eyes.

“I always wondered,” she says. “She’d been acting strange, more impulsive than usual. She turned a desk over in one of her classes. Two of the nuns had to carry her out of there, kicking and screaming. Everyone whispered that her mother had packed her away to an institution, a nuthouse for troubled girls. But when she came back a few months later…well, I thought that theory made a convenient cover. That’s all.”

I try to think of my mother—shattered beyond repair from a dead father, a psychologically abusive mother, repeated rape, unwanted pregnancy, and stillbirth—somehow finding the strength to walk back into that school and face all the girls who thought she was crazy for crazy’s sake and to live in the shadow of the man who had gotten away with it, knowing he would again. My hands go to my neck.

“What do you know about the fire?” I ask now. I avoid Daniel’s eyes as I do.

Sabrina looks me over before answering. “Not much.”

“You never heard anything?”

“Oh, there was a lot of talk, if that’s what you mean—kids. Boys being boys. What I do know is it happened late in the night when no one would notice until it was far too late. The question I kept asking was who would want to burn down an empty building. Some people just like playing with fire, I guess.”

“Maybe someone who knew the truth,” I suggest. I’m careful to keep my voice even, to give nothing away.

“Maybe,” she says. “Maybe someone who wanted to make a point.”

I’m not sure it matters, beyond ensuring the school never reopened. “You said there were four of you?”

“That I knew. But six who came out after Sister Margaret went to the police. Who knows how many more had already graduated like your mom?”

“Why the police? Why not have the church handle it?” Daniel asks.