Do you need anything? I wanted to ask. More water? Another pillow? I meant to ask these things, but that’s not what I said. There was a larger question, a dangerous one. But it couldn’t wait any longer. I needed to know. I couldn’t go to Mills until I heard it from Jean herself.

“Did you do it?” I asked.

Jean looked horrified.

“What?” Almost a moan, and the tears came faster, but I couldn’t stop. Every action of the past week had been based around my assumptions that Jean had pulled the trigger. I’d gone to jail for those assumptions. I now faced life in prison for them.

“Did you kill him?” I asked again. “Did you kill Ezra?”

Jean’s mouth gaped and then collapsed. “I thought you did it,” she said. It was her child’s voice, so vulnerable that I saw the truth of her words. She really believed that I’d done it.

“Is that what Alex told you, Jean? Is that why you think I did it? Because she told you I did it?”

Jean shook her head, hair moving over her eyes, coming to rest on her forehead. I saw that she’d pulled the sheet to her throat. Her eyes spilled confusion.

“You did it, Work. You had to have done it.”

“I thought you did it,” I said, and Jean rocked as if my words were bullets. Her eyes widened and she pushed deeper into the pillows that mounded behind her.

“No.” She shook her head again. “It had to be you. It had to be.”

“Why?” I asked, leaning closer. “Why me?”

“Because…” Her voice trailed off. She tried again. “Because…”

I finished her thought. “Because if you didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it, then Alex did. Is that what you were going to say?”

This time, she did roll away; she curled into a fetal ball, as if I might kick her, and for that moment I was at a loss. Jean hadn’t done it. Had I not known the truth about Alex, I would not have accepted that fact.

I’d been so damned sure.

“There are some things about Alex, Jean. Some things you might not know.” I had to jolt her out of her complacency, force her to accept the truth.

She spoke from across the chasm I’d opened between us. “I know everything there is to know about Alex, Work. There’s nothing you can tell me.”

“Do you know that’s not her real name?”

“Don’t do this, Work. Don’t try to come between me and Alex.”

“Did you know it?” I asked again.

Jean sighed. “Virginia Temple. That’s her real name. She changed it when she was released.”

“Do you know she killed her father?” I asked.

“I know,” she said.

“You know about that?” I couldn’t believe it. “Do you know how she killed him?” Jean was nodding, but I couldn’t stop. The horror of it was still too fresh in my mind. Cooked meat. Charred lungs. Alex watching and her mother sliced to ribbons. “She handcuffed him to the bed and set it on fire. She burned him alive, Jean. For Christ’s sake, she burned him alive!”

Suddenly, I was on my feet. Beneath me, Jean contracted even further. She was hugging her knees to her chest, cringing, and I saw that the line from her saline bag had a kink in it. The sight calmed me down, forced me to get a grip on my raging emotions. I knew that I was losing it. It was all too much. I took a deep breath, then leaned over to straighten the kink, but when my hand brushed against her arm, she flinched.

“I’m sorry, Jean. I’m really sorry.” She declined to respond, and her body rose up as she sucked in a mighty breath. I found the chair again and fell into it. I buried my face in my palms, pressed against my eyes until I saw sparks. But for her wet breath, the room was silent. I took my hands away and looked at her. She was still clenched in a ball.

“It scares me, Jean. It scares me that she killed her father, and it scares me that she has this power over you.” I paused, looking for better words. “It just scares me.”

Jean did not respond, and for a long time I watched her in silence. After a few minutes of this, I felt the need to move, to do something. I got up and went to the window. I pulled back the curtain and stared across at the parking deck. A car pulled in and turned on its headlights.

When Jean spoke, I could barely hear her.

“She had a pool. Growing up, she had a pool.”

I walked back to the bed. When she rolled her face off the pillow, I could see the wet spot of her tears. “A pool,” I said, letting her know I was there and that I was ready to listen. I sat down. Her eyes were huge and raw; she showed them to me briefly, then turned back to the wall. I looked at her back and waited for her to go on. Finally, she did.

“It was one of those aboveground pools, like we used to make fun of when we were kids. A poor kid’s pool. She didn’t care that it was cheap or flimsy. She didn’t care that it sat behind a single-wide or that it was visible from the road. She was a kid, you know. And it was a pool.” Jean paused. “The best thing that ever happened to her.”

I could see it as if I were there; yet I already sensed the truth of it. It was the way she said it. The pool was not the best thing that ever happened to her. Not by a long shot.

Jean continued. “When she turned seven, her father implemented the new policy. That’s exactly how he said it. ‘We’re implementing a new pool policy.’ He tried to make a joke out of it. She didn’t care one way or another. But if she wanted to hang out around the pool, she had to be wearing high heels and makeup. That was the policy.” She paused, and I heard her sharp intake of breath. “That’s how it started.”

I knew where this was going, and I felt my insides clench in disgust. Hank had been right.

“The policy didn’t include her mother. Just her. She told me once that her mother stopped hanging out at the pool after that. She didn’t do anything about it. She just didn’t want to see it. Her father was out of work that year, so that’s what they did. They hung out at the pool. In the summer, I guess, that was enough. Watching, I mean. But two weeks after they closed up the pool for the winter, it started.”

I did not want to hear this. I wanted her to stop. But I had to hear it and she had to say it. We were trying to find the road.

“He didn’t just fondle her, Work. He raped her. He sodomized her. When she fought back, he beat her. After that summer, she wasn’t allowed to have pajamas. For God’s sake, she had to sleep naked. Another policy. It didn’t start slow and build up. It exploded into her life. One day she was seven. The next day she was getting it regular. His term. But in spite of that, it somehow got worse over time, like he got bored with her and had to find new ways to make it fun. She can’t talk about some of the things he did, not even now. And she’s the strongest person I know.

“It went on for years. He never did go back to work. He drank more and he gambled more. On three occasions, he loaned her out to cover his gambling debts. A hundred dollars here, two hundred there. She was eleven the first time. The guy was a shift foreman at the rubber plant in Winston-Salem. He weighed three hundred pounds. Alex weighed a little over seventy.”

“Her mother…” I began.

“She tried to tell her mother once, but she didn’t want to hear it. She accused her of lying and slapped her. But she knew.”

Jean fell silent.

“She could have gone to the authorities,” I said.

“She was a child! She didn’t know any different. By the time she turned thirteen, it started to get a little better. He molested her less and beat her more.” Jean rolled her eyes to me. “She was getting too old for him. She hit puberty and he started to lose interest.”

“She was fourteen when she killed him,” I said. “Well past puberty.”

A sound escaped Jean’s throat, part laugh and part strangled cry. She turned her entire body over, raised herself up on one elbow as if to meet me eye-to-eye. “You don’t get it, Work.”

“If he’d stopped abusing her-”