“He’s sick,” she said. “He’s not in his right mind. He’s an addict, addicted to lies as much as to the drugs. And you taped him without his knowing?”

“I taped him without his knowing.”

“That was so unfair.”

“Unfair is the way I play it when my neck is on the line.”

She clutched the tape to her chest, leaned back, let her head loll on the sofa. “Let’s just go away, let’s just go someplace else. Let’s get on a plane and get the hell out of here and start over. Just you and me.”

“And the tape.”

“Stop it.”

“And Terry, too, when he decides to show up again and infect your life.”

“He won’t. I’ll make him promise. That will be the price for leaving him out of it.”

“There’s no leaving him out of it, and there’s no running away. They’ll grab us as soon as we hit the airport. Our attempted escape will be Exhibit One at our trial and add years to our sentences. We have to stay and fight. And the tape is all we have to fight with.”

“We can stonewall.”

“That’s what they want us to do. So they can pile accusations on our heads, one after another, while we sit quietly and take it. Pretty soon the pile will be too high to shovel our way out of.”

“We can find someone else to blame. What about that Miles Cave? I thought we agreed. Why didn’t you tell the police about him? Why can’t he be the one?”

“Because he doesn’t exist.”

“All the better.”

“Except that your lawyer has set up a frame of his own so it looks like I’m Miles Cave.”

“Why would Clarence do that?”

“To get me out of the way. Because he loves you.”

“Oh,” she said, not at all surprised.

“I’d set up Clarence, and enjoy doing it, but he has an alibi. At the moment Wren was killed, he was at an ATM, getting cash to pay off Terry.”

“We have to do something, Victor.”

“Yes, we do. We have to give the tape to the police. On it Terry admits to coming to the house, to demanding money, to being shown the open and empty safe by Wren. He admits to taking the gun and shooting Wren in the head and then dropping the gun on the floor and fleeing. And you know why he did it?”

“Stop this.”

“For you. Because he loves you and he wanted for you to be happy. With me.”

“He’s insane.”

“Yes, he is. And it’s all here, all his insanity, on the tape. You have to give the tape to the police.”

“I can’t.”

“Sure you can.”

“You don’t understand. I don’t even understand it myself. I loved him so much. With a pure adolescent love that never leaves, that remains like a jagged diamond in the heart. Shakespeare’s poetry seemed to come as naturally to us as our breaths. I would hold him, and he would kiss me, and the words just appeared. ‘My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.’ Just to think of him then can still draw out tears. You don’t know what it’s like.”

I didn’t say anything to that, I just stared at my own jagged diamond in the heart.

“He was so sweet, so sensitive. The part of myself that loved him was the best part of me,” she said. She wasn’t really talking to me anymore, she was talking to herself, her younger self, trying to justify all that she had given up. “When I hear the word ‘love,’ it’s his face that comes to mind.”

“Then why aren’t you together forever and always?” I said, interrupting her reverie.

“You sound so bitter.”

“I’ve been here before,” I said. “I’ve heard the violins.”

“If only you knew the truth, you wouldn’t feel that way. You wouldn’t act so threatened. He’s not like other men.”

“He showed me.”

“What?”

“I asked him what was keeping you two apart. Why you didn’t just be with him. I asked him if he was gay, and he laughed, and then he asked me if I wanted to see.”

“So you know.”

“It’s not that big a deal.”

“To him it is. And it was to me, then. And the way I reacted.”

“You were sixteen.”

“And so was he. Imagine what it did to him. What I did to him. When he wouldn’t do anything, no matter how forward I was, I did something terrible. To push him to action, to make him jealous.”

“You screwed Sherman, the quarterback,” I said, my voice flat with the matter-of-factness of it all, “and Terry found you backstage before rehearsal.”

“I wanted him to find me. And he did. But I didn’t know about his condition then. You should have seen his face, Victor, cracked in pain. I can’t forget it. Ever. I can’t stop imagining it. Our love was real and impossible at the same time. I suppose that’s what made it so perfect.”

“Worth lying for? Worth betraying me for?”

“Worth everything,” she said. “Still. I have no choice but to save him.”

“You can’t.”

“But I can’t stop trying either, don’t you see?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t. Listen, Julia. That tape is our last hope. I don’t know if we could ever make each other happy, but that tape is the only way to find out. Since you’ve come back into my life, we’ve been bouncing like Ping-Pong balls from emotion to emotion. Bitterness to lust to suspicion to fear to paranoia. But now there’s hope, it resides in the truth, the truth on that tape.”

She tossed the tape player back onto the table. “I don’t want it,” she said.

“If I turn it in, you’ll hate me forever. If you turn it in, our future opens wide.”

“Don’t make me.”

“I could never make you do anything. But I can make you choose.”

A slight sneer stained her lips. “Between you and him?”

“Between truth and nothing. From the moment you stepped in this door, you’ve been lying. You’re pretending to care about us, but it’s an act. All you care about is saving him.”

“That’s not true.”

“Another lie.” I stopped for a moment, thought about that strange room in which Terrence Tipton now lay, that tomblike room concocted solely out of Julia’s fantasies. “In fact,” I said, slowly, as revelation dawned, “everything we ever had was a lie, because the biggest truth, your love for Terry, was always hidden. But now there’s a line. On one side is the end of lies. On the other side is the end of hope, any hope you might have for something, anything, that’s worthwhile in your future. Because if you can’t face the truth now, that hope is dead.”

“It died fifteen years ago.”

“Stop it. You and he are both blathering idiots. So he’s got no cock. Find a surgeon, for God’s sake. You screwed the quarterback to get him jealous. It happens every day – why do you think high school quarterbacks are always smiling? And the tragic dénouement was a stupid high school play, nothing more. Shakespeare being mangled by high school kids is bad theater, but it’s not a tragedy. Get off the damn balcony and move on.”

She looked at me with something implacable warping her features. Then she stood up and grabbed her bag. “I need to use your bathroom.”

I waited for her to desperately snatch the tape recorder from off the table. I expected that she would take it to the bathroom, pull out the cassette, yank the tape free, and flush it down the toilet. She eyed me for an instant as if she were calculating the odds of her actually getting her hands back on the tape before I grabbed it. But if she wanted to destroy the tape, I wasn’t going to stop her. All I really wanted was an answer, finally, and her grabbing the tape like that would ring as clear as I could hope for. But she didn’t grab the tape. Instead she glanced at it, glanced at me, and then went off through the bedroom door, leaving me both confused and just the slightest bit optimistic, which in my experience has always proved to be fatal.

It took her a long time to return. She was thinking it through. I sat in the darkness and thought it through myself. I wondered if possibilities still existed. I wondered if we had a future. I wondered if that’s what I really wanted. As the minutes ticked by, my neck tensed, my heart beat a little faster. What had I gotten myself into? I had been fighting all this time to keep something alive, and suddenly, with the tape still on the table and the possibility for survival rising all the while, I began to think it would have been better to let it die, long ago. Better had it shriveled like a leech covered in salt and suffered an excruciating death than to let it attach back onto my heart.