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at June’s back, and she could see Richard’s reflection in the glass. His face was passive. There was a glint of white from his glasses. She glanced down and saw that his hands were in his lap.
    She glanced down and saw that he was enjoying the story.
    By the time the deposition was over, June’s jaw was so tight that she could not open her mouth to speak. Her spine straightened hard as steel. Her hands clenched into fists.
    And yet, she did not say a word. Not when the girl had described a birthmark on Richard’s back, a scar just below his knee, a mole at the base of his penis. Not when she talked about the obsessive way he’d stroked his hands through her hair. The way he had held her from behind and used his hand on her. The way he had seduced this fifteen-year-old child the same way he had seduced June.
    And June had thought of her words, long ago, to Grace. ‘Which is more possible,’ she had asked. ‘That every single person in the world is conspiring to make you seem a fool, or that you are only fooling yourself?’
    June had left the prosecutor’s office without a word to anyone. She drove straight to the school administration offices, where they gladly accepted her temporary leave of absence. She went to the dollar store and bought a packet of underwear, atoothbrush and a comb. She checked into a hotel room and did not go home until the newspaper headlines told her that Richard would not be there.
    He had left the heat on eighty, a man who had fastidiously turned off hall lights and cranked down the thermostat on the coldest days. The seat was up on all the toilets. All the bowls were full of excrement. Dirty dishes spilled over in the sink. Trash was piled into the corner of the kitchen. The stripped mattress held the faint odor of urine.
    ‘Fuck you, too,’ June had mumbled as she burned his clothes in the backyard barbecue.
    The school board couldn’t fire her for being married to an imprisoned sex offender. Instead, she was moved to the school in the worst part of town where routinely she was called to testify in court cases concerning students who’d been accused of armed robbery, rape, drug trafficking, and any other number of horrors. Her social life was non-existent. There were no friends left for the woman who had defended a pedophile. There were no shoulders to cry on for the principal who had called the students who’d been raped by her husband a pack of lying whores.
    Over the years, June had considered giving an interview, writing a book, telling the world what it was like to be in that room, sitting across from Danielle Parson, and knowing that her husband had just as good as killed them both. Each time June sat down to write the story, the words backed up like bile in her throat. What could she say in defense of herself? She had never publicly admitted her husband’s guilt. June Connor, a woman who had relished the English language, could find no words to explain herself.
    She had shared a bed with Richard for eighteen years. She had born him a child. She had lost their child. They had loved together. They had grieved together. And all the while, he was a monster.
    What kind of woman didn’t see that? What kind of educator, what kind of principal, lived in a house where a fifteen-year-old girl was brutally sodomized and did not notice?
    Pride. Sheer determination. She would not explain herself. She did not owe anyone a damn explanation. So, she kept it all bottled up inside of her, the truth an angry, metastasizing tumor.
    ‘Another story about the weather,’ Richard said, rustling pages as he folded the paper. ‘Umbrellas are suggested.’
    Her heart fluttered again, doing an odd triple beat. The tightness in her chest turned like a vise.
    ‘What is it?’ Richard reached for the mask hanging on the oxygen tank.
    June waved him away, her vision blurring on her hand so that it seemed like a streak of light followed the movement. She moved her hand again, fascinated by the