I shake my head. Why do I always feel the need to make excuses for him? Maybe I’m just looking for a way to not hate someone I loved for so long. The cost of all this has already been too high. “I think a lot of people, not just Luke, had this feeling that I might be contagious. Like if they looked too closely at what was happening to me, they might have to accept that something like that could also happen to them. What was even worse was all the people who blamed us, me some, but my parents especially. And oh god, Cali, they deserve it least, they’re the best people in the world.” My voice catches as I think about my mom and dad in the eye of the storm. Of all the things I hold on to as truth—and some days, it doesn’t feel like much—this I do know: my parents didn’t fail Penny. I’m sure they made garden-variety parenting mistakes, but they were loving and kind and generous, and they did their best, which is all two humans can ever do.

Some of the trial watchers—the pathetic people who treated our misfortune as entertainment—speculated that I was deluded and didn’t see the malevolence of my parents. But no one who knew the Clearys felt this way. People forget that I was the one who was there, following on her heels less than two years behind throughout the majority of her life. When it comes to Penny, I am the witness, the one and only. Once I started pulling on threads, there were a thousand tiny things she’d done: minor lies that had blossomed into major ones, her illness—such as it was—had been a progression.

I explain some of this to Cali now, how it happened slowly and then all at once. And while Luke had turned out to no longer even be up to the task of being a real friend, Blair’s true nature had shined through, making him feel, by the end, like my last real friend on earth. He called me from every stop on the World Cup that year, occasionally badgering his brother, who’d not yet mustered the courage to break things off, to talk to me as well. He flew into town for barely twenty-four hours between races so that he could be there when I testified. He’d been the one in the hospital with my parents when I came out of surgery after my accident. I’d repaid his loyalty by pulling away and now by fleeing the hemisphere without even telling him where I was going. I could only hope he’d forgive me. Knowing him, he would.