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offered it to her, but Margaret waved him away as if he were an annoyance. His inability to take any discernable or effective action left him feeling helpless in the Corrigan home. Roger could only bear witness as Maura’s stoic resolve gradually began to crumple with each successive visit, like time-lapse photography. The bonfire of hope that had kept her spine straight and her adrenal glands pumping for that week in the hospital had been cruelly extinguished. In the lengthy stretches he sat, ate, or watched TV with his grandchildren, Maura looked more and more like a wax version of herself, her body limp, her eyes hollow and empty.
    Roger took in his daughter’s kitchen, the warm cherry cabinets and gleaming polished stone counters on the eating island, now under his wife’s command. Soft lights below the cabinets gave the illusion of coziness, and he could see that Margaret had organized and cleaned every surface. Even the chrome appliances sparkled.
    Out past the flagstone patio with the boxwood hedges, weeds sprouted in beds and in the potted geraniums. Roger thought momentarily about helping with the gardening and then dismissed the thought. Margaret always jokingly accused him of not knowing a weed from a flowering perennial; he’d better not disturb the wrong things out there. For the time being, he would have to grow accustomed to his ineffectiveness in his daughter’s household.
    Suddenly Roger remembered a colleague, a man he hadn’t thought of in ages. Ed Schultz. He’d worked with Roger some fifteen years ago. They’d been on a prospective sales call with a burgeoning developer in Denver and had ended up at the bar together after dinner. Ed had been steadily downing one bourbon after the other, and as he’d moved from tipsy to drunk, he’d weepily confided in Roger that his high school–aged daughter had been raped at a rock concert in downtown Chicago. There was alcohol involved and some rowdy boys, strangers who she had ended up with in the parking lot when she’d gotten separated from her friends.
    As the father of two daughters, he found it impossible not to picture every parent’s worst nightmare. The images of the drunken boys holding her down in the back of the car and taking turns had played out in his head. They had been laughing as they raped her, Ed had told him, laughing, slapping one another and making noises like rodeo cowboys. And at that point in the story Ed had begun to sob, erupting over the highly varnished wood bar in the hotel with a strangled, choking sound, almost inhuman, as he struggled to regain control.
    He’d felt helpless, Ed told Roger. He’d been filled with a black fury, and yet he was impotent. He raged, but his rage had no outlet. He wanted to hurt someone, to punch something, to inflict physical damage. The boys had never been identified, but he told Roger that if he ever found them, he dreamed of what he would do to them. Each night, he told Roger, he imagined something different, some new, slow way to torture them, to make them physically pay.
    “The hardest part,” Ed told Roger, “was that I didn’t protect my little girl. I failed her. And I’m her father.” Ed had drained his glass and wiped the snot running from his nose with his sleeve as he moved unsteadily off the stool, his eyes tight and glassy. Roger helped him to his room that night, opening the door with the key and making sure he made it inside. The next morning, in the taxi to the airport, neither one of them acknowledged the previous evening’s raw confession. Ed sat woodenly in the cab, regretting, Roger was sure, that he had spilled such intimate details to a coworker. Within a year, the Schultz family had moved away from Chicago.
    Roger remembered that comingled with the feelings of sadness and outrage on Ed’s behalf that night, he’d had a feeling of relief, of feeling slightly sanctimonious and even superior regarding his own good fortune. Wasn’t that something , Roger thought,