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set—even to your father’s satisfaction—for what we have to tell you.
    And that detail is this. When finally Sharon Solarz had been read her rights, formally arrested and handcuffed, taken to Albany, and booked, she was then offered a chance to write and sign a full confession.
    And when she declined that opportunity, she was at last permitted to contact her lawyer.
    The lawyer she called was, per her instructions from Billy, Gillian Morrealle, a criminal defense lawyer at the Boston firm of Stockard, Dyson, Freeh and Kerry; one who had made something of a specialty of representing supposed “political” criminals, many from the sixties and seventies.
    There was nothing private about the call. It was overheard by the guards attending this high-profile prisoner, it was taped, and it was reported, verbatim, to Kevin Cornelius and, through him, to me.
    What she said, was, “Ms. Morrealle? My name is Sharon Solarz. Jim Grant told me to be in touch with you.”
    And now I think you see why, Izzy, I was suddenly, and deeply, curious. I hope you see why. And I think you see why. Because I know how smart you are, which is very, very smart indeed. Smart enough to understand that suddenly, this stopped being Sharon Solarz’s story, or Billy Cusimano’s, and became, in fact, your father’s.

Date:
Saturday, June 3, 2006
From:
“Daddy”
To:
“Isabel Montgomery”
CC:
maillist: The_Committee
Subject:
letter 3
    It’s good to know some things never change. Benjamino, for instance. His little account of how he got involved in all this, it got to me this morning around one, and if I didn’t know it was impossible, I’d swear that the e-mail smelled of bourbon, no matter that little Benny’s supposed to have given up drinking years ago.
    But I promised Molly I wasn’t going to get pissed off. I understand that everyone on this story experienced it from their own point of view. That some of those points of view reveal the excessive intake of alcohol and a warped sense of history, that need not detain us. I mean, I haven’t the slightest doubt that you read right beyond little Benny’s nonsense and understood how deeply, how profoundly, he had let himself be manipulated.
    Right, Izzy? I mean, you know your grandfather. Does it make sense to you?
    In any case, that Saturday, June 15, 1996, was a big day for a lot of people in this story. And my movements during the day would later come under some serious scrutiny. At the time, however, the only thing remarkable was the perfection of the spring morning, a blue sky empty but for wisps of fading night clouds, the silence of a sleeping neighborhood inhabiting our little corner of Saugerties like the dew hung in the air. In that silence, in your bed by the light-flooded window, you slept.
    Izzy. Do you know, all your childhood, I kept buying the newest video cameras available, and never once did I take a film? I’d lie in bed at night berating myself—your childhood was fleeing, and I was letting it go. ButI could not make myself even try to capture it, and each new camera would go, like the one before, unused. What it was, I’d have a vision of myself watching those films at eighty, and I didn’t think I could bear it. Love and loss, for so long, the two had been inextricable to me. How could I stand to look, then, at what I could barely face now: the beauty of this tiny being who had taught me everything I knew about love and who, with each second of her life, was vanishing before my eyes? And yet now, after all these years, I find that it doesn’t matter whether I filmed it or not, because we lose our children not once but over and over again. That loss, I can feel it now, yesterday, tomorrow, every minute, and I promise you, I do.
    Shit. I swore I wasn’t going to say this sort of thing to you. But I swear to you, now, sitting here, I can see every inch of that house I have not been in for ten years, just as it was that