If she hadn’t had the two boys, both under ten, maybe she would have done that. And if she’d run off that Wednesday afternoon, maybe I wouldn’t have had to watch her on television that night as Reverend Carl Corbin handed her over to two blandly dressed women with gray faces that matched their long habits. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to hear him tell us about the convent in North Dakota where Annie Wilson would live out her life with a wrist counter set to a daily maximum of zero.

What made up my mind to walk out of Eastern Market and head for Lorenzo’s car in the alley across the street wasn’t only lust, and it wasn’t only the one-sided argument I’d had with Patrick that morning. Rage had been crackling inside me like a fire, first a slow burn, then an inferno. I knew all about the double standard, the private clubs that had cropped up in cities and towns where single men of certain means could go to unload their stress and sperm on professional ladies of the entertaining sort. Patrick had told me about the clubs after overhearing a conversation at work. They were the last places where you could get your hands on a box of rubbers.

Prostitution, they say, is the oldest profession. And you can’t kill anything that old. Also, the gays had been taken care of in their prison camps; the adulteresses like Annie Wilson were working farms in North Dakota or the grain belt of the Midwest. The Pure had to do something about single women who had no families to take them in—they couldn’t very well live on their own with no words and no income. They were given a choice: marry or move to a cathouse.

When I thought of Sonia—of what would happen to her if Patrick and I were out of the picture, of whether she would be forced into a loveless marriage or sent away to a commune of whores where she could do nothing with her mouth but suck and moan—my blood boiled. Even the whores were supposed to shut up and behave.

So I walked out of Eastern Market and across the street, dodging potholes and semifrozen puddles, and got into Lorenzo’s car. It was the only method I had of saying “Fuck you” to the system.

Thanks to raging hormones and my own idiocy, the system said “Fuck you” right back. Lorenzo and I went at it three times. One with a condom. The others? Bareback all the way.

Christ, it was good.

Lin takes my hand, bringing me from that afternoon to this morning. “Be careful, honey. You’ve got a lot more to lose than your voice.”

“I know,” I say, and pull myself together just as Morgan knocks at our door.

Chapter Twenty-eight

TWENTY-EIGHT