I know all of this because “state of mind” figured heavily in his defense.

Just a few steps farther in, he recognized the sounds. He knew what they were and, worse, recognized me. He said later, on the stand, that he knew it was me because I used to breathe just like that when he tickled me when I was a kid: a distinctive kind of breathy whooping.

He didn’t walk through to the TV room, but he called out to make us stop.

We did so immediately. We dressed. When Jeremy turned off the TV, I squeezed my eyes shut. I needed something to dull the full effect of what was about to happen.

“Are you dressed?” Dad boomed from the front room.

“Yes,” I called back. Jeremy shoved the sheet into his backpack and took my hand to go meet him.

Tears slid down my face, but I didn’t cower.

Dad told me to walk myself home. He wanted to drive Jeremy to his house to talk to his parents. Jeremy shrugged. What else could we have done?

Jeremy kissed me on the cheek and said he would call me. I smiled bravely in return, and walked out past Dad without acknowledging him. From the next street I heard the yellow car start up in Uncle Joe’s driveway.

Dad said that when he and Jeremy got into the car, he saw Burger King bags on the floor of the passenger side, and a couple of big bags from a camping store in the back. We had used the car that day to buy a tent from a store out of town; a bunch of us were going to go up into the White Mountains later in August. Jeremy and I might have otherwise met at Uncle Joe’s on foot, and Dad would never have known we were there. But we’d had the car and, after getting a tent and a small grill, had stopped at Burger King on the way to Uncle Joe’s. When the lawyer prompted him, Dad described everything from this point onward-Burger King bags, camping stuff-in emotionless detail. He gave everything equal weight, to dull it, I guess. To flatten it all out.

When I got home no one was there, and I’d given Dad my key ring for the car. I sat outside on the step. I heard it happen, three streets over.

Dad admits that Jeremy didn’t say anything during the ride, which made it difficult for Dad’s lawyer to prove provocation in the moment. Dad says he doesn’t know why he did it, he just felt, compellingly, that it needed to be done. He makes it clear that this feeling wasn’t rational, and it isn’t one he retains. In fact, he says, as soon as it was over he recognized it for the horror it was. But as he did it, he said, it was as unthinking as a routine. You don’t put on your tie in the morning because you want to, he said. You do it because that’s what you do.

The prosecution had a slow ramp-up to their full description of the act. They had street diagrams and skid marks and experts on that particular engine to indicate where and how quickly Dad had accelerated. Apparently, Jeremy would have briefly seen it coming. Dad drove straight for the oak tree in the Palmers’ yard, no swerving. He had nothing against the Palmers; it was just a big tree near the road.

The defense tried to make it look like an act of suicidal depression, but Dad had aimed the car so the passenger side would impact the tree and the driver side wouldn’t. One could argue that that was luck more than good aim, but Dad admits it was intentional.

Jeremy had been thrown into the windshield. His face got shredded and sprayed blood like a cloudburst. His head was cracked open by the impact, and Dad said he could see Jeremy’s brain. He said it like it was just a detail, the same way he had seen the Burger King bags. Dad said Jeremy had seemed unconscious, but breathed in a rattly way for a while beside him. The coroner says that death was instantaneous, but I believe Dad because he was there.

Dad had had an airbag. He cracked three ribs.

In the trial, there was some haggling over whether Dad knew that the passenger side didn’t have an airbag, whether he knew that his side did, and whether he’d noticed that Jeremy hadn’t put on his seatbelt. He was given seven and a half years, and will likely serve only five.

And all of this happened because Will broke his arm.

I finished high school at home with tutors. I didn’t have too many credits outstanding, so there wasn’t that much to do. The school was nice. They didn’t make me come in for classes, but let me continue to be in the orchestra. I like being surrounded by the swell and flow of all those musical machine bits; I like being one of those bits. I like being part of something that works.

I spent the year after that at home with Mom and Will, planning. I was going to get away, there was no doubt about that. I had to get away, but I wanted to get somewhere good.

I haven’t seen Dad except at the trial. He sent me a present for my last birthday, a beautiful copy of a sixteenth-century planetary model, a pre-Copernican Earth-centered universe, to go with my intended studies. It spins beautifully, representing the best effort of an early scientist, all of whose hard work hinged on an error. I think Dad was admitting that he’d been wrong about a lot of things, fundamentally wrong.

The card was in Dad’s writing, and the model was the kind of detailed, physical, well-engineered item he liked to share. But I think my brother helped him get it-I assume it was he who bought it and wrapped it. He probably helped Dad figure out to choose it in the first place. Why would Will do that? Why would he want to help Dad?

I didn’t try to see Jeremy’s family or attend the funeral. I think they would have flipped. I know that if you pressed them they wouldn’t say they held me responsible, but of course they did. I actually didn’t know his family that well. Jeremy and I had mostly seen each other at school.

The media was kind to me. I was never mentioned except sympathetically. They didn’t draw Dad right, though. They just assumed conservatism was involved. Dad’s actually agnostic and liberal. Who the hell knows what happened in his head?

I was made to go see a counselor; that was part of getting such a sweet deal with school attendance. I actually got a great one. Her name was Laurel Bell. Two nouns, just like that.

She said I didn’t have to say anything, but I did have to stay for the full hour each week, to give myself the chance to say something.

For most of the sessions I just played my cello.

For the last month before I left, I swear to God, we played poker. No kidding. She was awesome. We actually laughed.

When I told all this to Gretchen, she’d said, “What about your mother? How did she deal with all of it?”

And the answer was, I didn’t know. I didn’t think about her.

This is what I think happened here in Cambridge: I think Mom talked with Nick and found out what had passed between us. I think she saw another Jeremy. And I think she was another Dad.

It’s probably not rational to think that. Mom hadn’t been in the car with Dad and Jeremy. She hadn’t freaked about the condoms. But I’m sure there is this orbit around me, this moon-path, that Mom follows as much as Dad ever did. She takes too much of an interest in me. She’s too attached. I keep trying to cut her loose, but my gravity hauls her even across oceans. Some people think that Dad must have been antifeminist or Saint Paul obsessed, but they don’t understand that it wasn’t philosophy steering that car. It was an attachment to me. It’s me.

I walked back to St. Peter’s Terrace in the dark. The dark was nice. I feel safe when no one can see me.

My mother had been recorded on closed-circuit TV talking with Nick at New Square, at ten o’clock on the Wednesday night. That was the night before he was gone. The camera recorded her catching up with him and having a conversation that looked serious and, at the end, confrontational. When they parted, he went on toward the Grafton, chased by her a few minutes later. Mr. Tisch told me that the police actually don’t care about Jeremy. Isn’t that bizarre? They would have arrested her even without the taint of his death.