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Craig.
    “It’s not legal for you to talk to me right now,” Bobbie says. “It’s called tampering with a witness—”
    “
Legal
,” June says, as though the word is a nonsense word made up by a child. “All I am asking you, sweetheart, is to
please
not do this.”
    “Don’t tamper, Mother. Just go home.”
    “I will, as soon as you say you won’t go through with this ridiculous trial. He’s already been through one ordeal and now you want to put him through another?”
    The other ordeal was in the form of a fifteen-year-old girl whose parents discovered Craig was having sex with their daughter. And even though he almost certainly had been doing just that, they’d lost the case. Bobbie takes a long breath, her eyes fastened on her mother’s face. “I hope you are saying this because you think he’s innocent,” she says.
    “Of course he’s innocent!”
    Bobbie shakes her head. “Do you think I made up everything I said in my statement?”
    June looks at her, assessing Bobbie’s tone. “I think you are confused,” she says finally. “And I know you’ve never cared for Craig. He knows it, too, and it hurts him. But that is for another discussion. We can sort all this out as a
family
.”
    “He’s not my family.”
    “You never gave him a chance—”
    “A
chance
?” Bobbie scoffs. “Has it not occurred to you that what I am telling the jury tomorrow is actually true?”
    “We can discuss all of that. Of course, we can. Meanwhile, you are behaving like this crazy girl did, hurling accusations at Craig. What we need to do is come together as a family and protect one another!”
    Bobbie listens as her mother describes the girl, who had been seeing a psychiatrist and who self-harmed and had no friends, who was a truant and a loiterer and a shoplifter. “You have no idea what kind of family she was from! You don’t want to be linked in any way with such people,” June says, shaking her head to emphasize the point. “People go after Craig because he’s famous, you know. A public figure.”
    “He’s a disc jockey, so what?”
    “That is quite an achievement, don’t you think? A radio announcer? A
personality
?”
    “Oh Jesus,” Bobbie says. The conversation is ridiculous, and so at odds with the pretty, scented room in which they find themselves. She turns to her mother now, eyeing her squarely. “I gave that statement months ago,” she says. “It’s already done.”
    “But it isn’t too late to undo! The lawyer told me you could still withdraw it. Please, Bobbie, I’m begging you. I promised him I’d speak to you—”
    “Did he drive you here?” Bobbie asks. “Where is he parked?” She thinks he must be outside somewhere, stewing in his car. She could imagine him there, slumped over the wheel, his temper ticking like a bomb.
    June gives up and sits hard on the bed. She bends her head into her hands. She might be crying, Bobbie can’t tell. She might be faking.
    “If you saw this girl!” she pleads. “If you saw the parents! The mother was covered in tattoos! I am sure they put that girl up to this crazy accusation. She looks twenty-one, not fifteen. In fact, she’s not fifteen anyway; she’s sixteen. But she
looks
like an adult. And this thing she claims with Craig is outrageous!”
    “You think so,” Bobbie says flatly.
    “Who told you about that case anyway? I can’t believe you read
our
local papers from wherever it is you live now.”
    “California. And no, I don’t.”
    “Then who told you?”
    She’d heard about it from Dan. Her mother would not even remember who Dan was; he was another bit of history about which her mother appeared to recall nothing.
    “You are about to make a terrible mistake!” June says. “And what if he is found guilty? Can you imagine? What if he goes to—” She stops, unable to say the word
jail.
“I’m your mother. You can’t just—” Bobbie sees how bewildered her mother is, how she cannot understand why her daughter had